


Thagirion

by joudama



Category: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII
Genre: AU, Gen, pre-game
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2011-07-04
Updated: 2016-11-03
Packaged: 2017-10-21 00:41:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 45,660
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/219025
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/joudama/pseuds/joudama
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A mad scientist decides to try a new experiment, with a girl who is the last of her kind and a terrorist who remembers more than she should. (AU charityfic)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

  * For [illumynare](https://archiveofourown.org/users/illumynare/gifts).



> This is for illumynare, who won my help_japan auction. :D  She made an incredibly generous bid, and as someone actually living in Japan, I am extremely grateful.  Also, I'd ask that if you enjoyed this fic, to please consider donating to $5 or so to a charity.  It doesn't really matter which one, but it'd be a way for the spirit of help_japan--and all of the help_* auctions--to keep going.  
>    
> This is an AU fic.  I don't actually like writing AUs, believe it or not, but that's mainly because my internal nitpicker is kind of evil.  This means that if I do write an AU, I more write "butterfly effect"/"road not taken" style AUs, in which a single choice is made differently, and everything flows out from there. In this case, the "road not taken" comes from Tifa making a different decision in the hospital in Midgar than the one she actually made pre-game.  
>    
> The prologue is written in a slightly unusual style for me; blame the Haruki Murakami influence (ahaha, oh boy, is there an influence). ^^;;  There's a stylistic reason for it, though, and hopefully that will be clear by the time you get through the whole thing.  There's a method to my madness, I promise. (Likewise, the titles and the epigraphs will all make a loooot more sense once the whole thing is finished.  Method to my madness, honest.)  
>    
> There are, duh, much more extended notes, but for the sake of brevity, I'm cutting them from the intros to the fic sections--if you're interested in all the influences (from Murakami to Japanese mythology to Kabbalah to the Qliphoth to numerology to Holocaust studies to a Finnish band), I'll be posting them separately later as an Ultimania. :D Also, thanks to peeka_chan for the beta! :D

Prologue [序]:   
過去を書き換えれば  
[If You Could Rewrite the Past]

  
   
\--  
   
 _「あなたは過去を書き換えたい？」  
「君は過去を書き換えたくない？」  
彼女は首を振った。「私は過去だとか、歴史だとか、そんなものを書き換えたいとはちっとも思わない。私が書き換えたいのはね、今ここにいる現在よ」  
-村上春樹、1Q84 Book 1 _  
\--   
   
The day her father dies is the day Nibelheim burns to the ground.  
   
\--  
   
The day Nibelheim burns to the ground is the day Tifa Lockheart almost dies.  
   
She knows how close she's come when she opens her eyes and wishes very much that she hadn't, because with consciousness comes pain.  
   
"Don't move, child," Zangan says quickly, and casts Cure on her...and it isn't enough.  Cure was usually more than good enough for training injuries, but the way the Cure feels like it has barely made a dent in the _wrongness_ of her stomach tells her how close she must have been to dying--and still is.  
   
Her stomach is bandaged, the vest she had been wearing gone and the rest of her clothes are stained with dried blood, and she wonders for a moment what had happened to her hat before the pain makes her drift out again.  
   
\--  
   
When she opens her eyes and can at last keep them open, Zangan is nowhere to be seen.  There is only an older woman, plump and greying, checking the contents of the IV in Tifa's arm.  
   
"Zangan--" Tifa tries to say, but " _Dad_ \--" comes out instead, and she remembers, horribly, the last time she had seen her father. She pushes the image of his broken body away as quickly as she can, before she can think about it more and remember more than that involuntary flash before her eyes of her father on the ground.  Now isn't the time, not yet, and if she dares think about it for even an instant, she'll be in tears.  "My teacher...the one who brought me...where?" she says, feeling stupid and confused and desperate. She doesn't even know where she is, let alone where her teacher is.  
   
What she does know, however, is that her father is dead.  The one thing she wishes she didn't know, she knows all too well.  
   
The nurse is kind, in her way.  "You're in a hospital in Midgar.  You had a pretty near-miss, but you'll be OK now."  
   
"Where is--where is Zangan?  The man who brought me here?"  
   
The nurse frowns.  "I'm not sure, honey.  You've been here a good few weeks now.  No one's been in to see you," the nurse says with a pitying smile.

Never in her life has Tifa felt so alone.  
   
She feels the tears coming, and she doesn't try to stop them at all when the nurse leaves to get a doctor.  
   
She wouldn't have been able to stop them anyway.  
   
\--  
   
She cries every night for the next week--crying for her father, for her home, and for herself.  
   
\--  
   
They have told her she can leave soon; that she will be well enough to go in maybe another week or so.  It took her a long time to recover, even with the Cures--Zangan's had held her together, but it took _time_ for the body to recover.  Cures may have seemed like magic, but they weren't--they were just hitting a Haste on the body's healing itself, and too much would exhaust you.  It was a price you paid later, when you finally got to rest and you slept like the dead and when you woke up you ate everything in sight.    
   
She had known the day was coming, but...but she hadn't wanted to think about, or had even been able to think about it--about what she would do when she left. But now, laying in the hospital bed with nothing, she realizes that soon she can go...but has nowhere to go _to_.  
   
She realizes, then, that she has two choices--she can stay in Midgar, alone, and try to rebuild herself and her life and hope to somehow find Cloud in this city, or she can go after Zangan.  
   
The sting from being left--being _abandoned_ \--makes tears prickle at her eyes, and she blinks quickly to stop them, and looks out the window, seeking a distraction.  
   
There is no sky here--only the dark, metallic plate and the artificial lights mimicking the sun, and in a flash, rage fills her.  
   
ShinRa built that--ShinRa.  A company so drunk on itself and caring so little about people that they blocked out the sun.  It makes her feel sick.  Her stomach clinches, and pain flares through her.  
   
She hasn't healed, not completely, and it almost feels like she never will, that her belly and her heart will always ache like this.  
   
There is a knock on the door, and a nurse, the one from the day she woke up, comes in, carrying a small bag.  "Feeling any better?" she asks, and Tifa gives a faint nod as she tries to compose her face.

"I asked around a bit," the nurse says brightly, and Tifa stares at her blankly.  "About the person who brought you here.  He apparently left this for you before he left," she says, and hands the bag to Tifa.

As soon as it is in her hands, Tifa begins to shake, and she clutches it to her tightly.  It is something real; something there and something solid.  She does not know what to do, or where to go, or how she will survive.

She's never been alone before, and pain expands in her chest.  Everything she had, everything she knew, everything she loved, is gone, and she has no idea what to do.

Something twists; the pain morphs into something far more comfortable, something that she is more familiar with, and reaches for--anger.  The things in her life are not _gone_ ; they were _taken_.  They were stolen away from her, and that anger intermingles with the feeling of loss, and her loneliness is at the core of it.

She decides, then, what she has to do--go after Zangan, beg him to-- _please, don't leave me alone again_ \--teach her more, just a bit _more_ , until she can stand on her own and take ShinRa down for what they have stolen away from her.  
   
She doesn't want to be alone, and this is all she has left.

\--  
   
She leaves before the doctors want her to, but she knows the longer she stays, the harder it will be for her to find Zangan, and the easier it will be to just stay in ShinRa's city.  
   
She had once dreamed about going to Midgar--Midgar was this magical place, the _big city_ , larger than life and far larger than her tiny little home, but now, the longer she stays, the sicker she feels and the more she longs to be _anywhere_ else--to see with her own eyes what ShinRa has done to her home, to _know_.  The decision to go, to find Zangan and beg him to teach her, has made her hate being here and hate everything it means, and hate Midgar with every passing instant.  She decided to go, and go she _will_ , and the longer she stays, the more angry she becomes at the injury keeping her here, and at ShinRa.  
   
And so she leaves that night, when it still hurts her to walk.  
   
She is fine with that, because it reminds her how weak she still is, and how much she still has to learn, and how much there still is for Zangan to teach her.  She vows, disgusted with herself, that she will never be in this weak position again.  
   
And she vows that one day, she will return to Midgar. She will return, and destroy it, the same as ShinRa destroyed her home, raze it somehow until there is nothing of ShinRa left.

And so she leaves, with nothing but a small bag, of things Zangan had left for her before he left, and that gives her the courage to go look for him--he has left her, but not completely abandoned her, and she will take that tiny sliver of something.  She doesn't have enough for what she knows will be terrifyingly high medical bills, so she leaves before she can even be told of them, and she almost feels guilty about it when she slips out in the middle of the night through a window.  If she were staying in Midgar, she would have found a job, found some way to pay for the procedures and efforts that saved her life.  But she is not staying and this is ShinRa's town; she owes none of them _anything_ , because she never should have been there to begin with.  
   
The night is warm, and she lets out a breath of relief when she is out from under the Plate and the moon and stars are finally overhead.  
   
And then, with a small look back at ShinRa's proud city of lights and Plates and rot, a city that stands while her home is nothing but ruins of ash, she takes off away at a run, and runs until she bleeds.  
   
\--  
   
It takes her two months to find Zangan.  He is far from Midgar, far from the entire Visgrad region, further south than she has ever been in her life.  It is hard for her to bear, this heat even so late in the year when the leaves should be beginning to turn red and the air should have an arid nip, and half the time she feels as if the weight of this air, laden with humidity like a storm that never comes, will suffocate her.  
   
She hates it here, and it makes the joy she feels at finding Zangan--at finding something that is _familiar_ \--all the stronger.  
   
She had thought, when she saw him, that her first words would be "Long time no see, Master Zangan," not the blurted and _young_ , "Why did you leave me?" that they are, and she would be ashamed of them were she not so angry and desperate.  She doesn't understand why he left her, why she could not have waited until she was awake, even as she clutched the bag he had left her every night when she slept.  It had been both  a life line and a weight: he had left her, but he had also left her this.  She had thought she was fine, but when she lays eyes on, the relief is almost instantly tainted with all the feelings of abandonment she has denied until that moment.  
   
Instantly eyes are on them, and Zangan, after a moment of surprise that is masked almost too fast for Tifa to identify, shakes his head.

"Not here, come with me," he says quickly, and leads her to the quiet square in the middle of this humid town, and they sit beneath a tree that offers a blessed bit of shade.

Now, Zangan looks at her, and his shoulders slump and his eyes close for an instant before he smiles.  "I knew you'd be all right.  You're a tough girl.  You wouldn't die so easily."

She had always been proud when Zangan would smile at her, but now it makes her angry.  "How did you know?  You just left me!" she says.

"Because I knew you'd live," he says flatly, and Tifa wonders what kind of answer that is supposed to be.

" _How_ was I supposed to live?  I survived, but...what am I supposed to _do_?"

He gave her a hard look, one with a touch of disgust.  He had given her that look sometimes in training, when she would falter and complain, at the beginning, that it was too much, and on some level, it shames her.

"You are alive, more than can be said for many," he says, and she is stung.  "Surviving is one thing, but now is the hard part.  And you can do it."

"How?!" she says, needing an answer.  The only answer she has for herself is to grow stronger, to fight, but now, with Zangan so cold, she has no idea what to do.  

"Why did you come after me?" he asks, and she knows before she can ask that he is going to deny her.  Zangan only teaches the students he choses, and she can tell, by the way he speaks, by the shuttered look on his face, that he is going to tell her no, and seeing that route crumble before her eyes sends waves of panic through her.

"What do you mean, 'why'?! What else _could_ I have done?" she says desperately. "Where else could I have gone?"

Zangan sighs.

"You could have stayed in Midgar and built a new life there.  I took you there for a reason, because it was so big that it would be easier for you to live unnoticed there.  You could slip into a new life."  
   
"I don't want a new life!" she yells.  "ShinRa took my life! They took away my home, they took away my life!  They took everything I had away from me!" she says, and the rage was all she had left. "How am I supposed to just start a new life and let them get away with this!?"  
   
When Zangan speaks, the words strike her to her core.  
   
"Forget this, Tifa Lockheart. You are strong, girl, but even you are not as strong as this," Zangan says, and there is something oddly sad in his voice. Zangan is usually so strong, and so defiant, that hearing the defeated tone he uses is a shock.  "Your old life is gone, and there is nothing you can do about it.  Vanish somewhere and never speak of Nibelheim again.  Do this, if you wish to live."  
   
"But--" she begins, and Zangan's words silence her again.  
   
"Do you forget I am from _Wutai_ , child?" he says sharply.  "I could tell you the names of many places in Wutai that no longer exist, but were at least granted to right to have once existed.  But the place where I was born..."  He falls silent for a long moment before he speaks again.  "There is a reason why I wander the world teaching.  It is because my home is a place that according to ShinRa never existed; a village that never existed so it was never razed to the ground and its inhabitants never slaughtered because they were never born.  I am from _nowhere_ because it is a 'nowhere' that was erased from history and the world, and I wander because my home is a place that existed yet never did.  I wander and teach all that remains of a school that was never developed at a monastery that never was in a place that never existed."  
   
Tifa falls silent, stunned, and Zangan turns away, scanning the horizon.  "I've wasted enough time here and it is not safe for me to stay in a single place too long.  The same is true for you," he says and gives her a sharp, pointed stare.  "Especially if you dare to remember.  Go," he ends, the word like a punch, and all Tifa can manage is a soft whisper that is pathetic and desperate even to her own ears.  
   
"I'm not strong enough," she says.  "Take me with you.  Teach me.  _Please_ ," she says, and bows bent double, biting her lip and her eyes squeezed shut. After what feels like too long, Zangan sighs.  
   
"Come, then."

Relief floods through her, and when he turns to walk away and gestures over his shoulder for her to follow, she does.  
   
\--  
   
 _"You want to rewrite the past?"  
"You _don't _want to?  
She shook her head.  "Not even in the slightest.  I don't want to rewrite the past, or history, or any of that. What I'd want to rewrite is where I am now. The present."_  
-Haruki Murakami, 1Q84 Book 1  



	2. One Set of Memories

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hee hee, remember, this is an AU, so the characters and a lot of situations are different - I write 'butterfly effect' AUs, and this is one of them. Everything will become clear in the next part, when I do more filling in. Promise. XD

Thagirion  
[Part 1]  
ひとつの記憶  
[One set of memories]

\--

 __  
「あいつらはね、忘れることができる」とあゆみは言った。「でもこっちは忘れない」  
「もちろん」と青豆は言った。  
「歴史上の大量虐殺と同じだよ」  
「大量虐殺？」  
「やった方は適当な理屈をつくて行為を合理化できるし、忘れてもしまえる。見たくないものから目を背けることもできる。でもやられた方は忘れない。目も背けられない。記憶は親から子へ受け継がれる。世界というのはね、青豆さん、ひとつの記憶とその反対側の記憶との果てしない闘いなんだよ。」  
-村上春樹、1Q84 Book 1  


\--

_Three years ago_

\--

"Please...please, just make it stop. I'll tell you _everything_ , give you all the names I know, just make it _stop_!" the young woman said, sobbing.

Reno smiled. It was a large, broad smile, one that was more dangerous than the sobbing young terrorist--all bravado, no training--had any idea it was. Or rather, Rude thought, more dangerous than she had sneeringly _assumed_ it wasn't when she was brought in.

She was a small fish, they knew that, but even she had to know someone who could be of use--or, at least, know someone who would know someone who would be of use.

"Smart girl," Rude said softly. "The names. Now. And maybe you'll get to go home one day."

 _An' maybe Odin'll come down and lay a big, wet kiss on my ass_ , he could hear in his head, in Reno's voice.

The girl--just barely old enough to have had her Coming-of-Age, and that was what made this work--looked at him for a split second before she dropped her eyes in shame, and started speaking through teary, exhausted gasps.

The funny thing about torture, Rude thought, was that normally, it didn't actually work. The real hardcore people, the zealots, they never snapped, no matter what you did. In, it tended to have the opposite effect, fed into their hate and feeling of being martyrs to the cause. Those type, they wouldn't say a damn thing, no matter what you did, and so they were the ones you just disappeared, drugged into stupors and threw into institutions, and once they started to fade from memory, made sure they met with an ignoble accident, so any followers had nothing to rally around.

Then there were the ones you ran into the most. They weren't the true believers, even if they thought they were. They may have believed in whatever cause it was, or liked the paycheck, but oh, they did indeed start to talk once you got _serious_ and things started to hurt.

It's just that what they said often didn't amount to jack _squat_ in terms of being true.

Some people--the vast majority--will, when they are in pain and you are causing it, will say whatever it is they think you want to hear to make it _stop._ They'd tell you their saintly grandmums were big criminal masterminds plotting the downfall of the Planet if that's what they thought you wanted. The vast majority of the time with torture, what you got wasn't enough to be worth anything--not unless it wasn't the _truth_ you were after you. It worked just fine for when you needed someone to scapegoat or needed an excuse, which meant anything dragged out of torture was just fine, because it fit the narrative you were weaving. Especially if that narrative wasn't exactly true. So those were the types you used when what you _needed_ wasn't necessarily something that had to be _true_.

 _Then_ you shot them in the head. Because they were of no more use, and if gods forfend you turned them loose, they would take that shame at vomiting out whatever lies it took to make you stop hurting them, and turn it into hate, and end up either rabidly in the first group or making rabid _followers_ who'd go in the first group.

But then, there were people like this girl, the rarest of the lot. Young, stupid, and _naive_. Young enough to still think they were invincible, stupid enough to think they'd get out just fine somehow, and naive enough to not know to lie...and to believe that you weren't.

"There are...there are five people in my circle," she said, her voice teary. "Me, Angela McQueen, Jareth Renolds, Francis Ishimura, and Tifa Lockheart. Tifa...she works at this bar, Seventh Heaven, and that's where we all meet. I think, I think she's the one who does inter-circle communication because she's got run of the bar and it's a good place for people to go and not get attention drawn, and she's supposed to buy it or something soon so we really have a, a headquarters or something. Everyone was talking about the money for it, or something, I wasn't paying attention. Please," she said, breaking down again, " _Please_ let me go home, I don't know anything else, I--" she began, and her voice cut off when Rude put his hand on her shoulder gently, and she looked up at him with large, pleading eyes before he swiftly and efficiently snapped the girl's neck.

Reno pulled out his PHS and began making calls as soon as it was done--they had to move fast before anyone in AVALANCHE found out one of their newest members (and they'd only found her because she had been young, and stupid, and had too big of a mouth) had been captured by the Turks.

In death, she looked even younger than her few years, and he took the briefest moment to close the girl's eyes before he made his own set of calls.

When he was finished, he checked his bracer, then fired off a spell.

And with only a few phone calls and a Fire materia, Mary Lin, sixteen-year-old budding ecoterrorist and the rare type who told the truth to make it stop, ceased to both exist and to have ever existed at all.

\--

" _And tonight, raids were done on a known terrorist cell here in Midgar. The group is suspected to have been responsible for a series of bombings at ShinRa reactors across the planet, and four individuals have been taken into custody--"_  
  
The video screen went off with a click, and the Turk put the remote control down, then turned to Tifa with a sigh as she crossed her arms. "And that's all that the public needs to see. All they want to see. We don't even have to say what happens to any of you afterwards, because no one cares. All they'll remember is 'the bad guys were arrested'. It makes things really easy for us. But maybe not so much for you," she ended with a faint smile.

Tifa just glared at her, breathing hard, and her tongue snaked out to catch some of the blood at the side of her mouth.

The Turk--a young woman probably only a hair older than Tifa herself, sighed and leaned against the table. The room was bare, other than that table, a chair, the chair Tifa was tied down to, and a single light. Tifa didn't want to think about the things on the table.

By now, she knew what most of them were used for anyway.

"You can make this a lot easier on all of us, you know. This will all stop if you just give us the information we need."

Tifa said nothing, just narrowed her eyes.

"You don't want to be here, I don't want to be here. You can end all of this right now. Why won't you just give us the information we need, so we can let you go?

"I don't get you terrorists. ShinRa has done so much for people all over the planet. So many people have much better, easier lives because of us."

"Except the people you've killed," Tifa said angrily.

The Turk smiled broadly. " _Killed_? ShinRa hasn't killed anyone. What funny ideas you have. What are you talking about? Who's been filling your head with that kind of nonsense?" she said, and the sickly sweetness of it made Tifa want to spit.

"'Filling my head'? No one has filled my head with anything; I've seen what you bastards have done with my own eyes!" Tifa snapped, and something in that made the Turk narrow her eyes.

"You're not just some little tree-hugger like the rest of them, are you?" she said sharply, and Tifa clamped her mouth shut and tilted her jaw up defiantly.

That made the Turk narrow her eyes dangerously. Then she reached into her jacket and pulled a small gun out from the holster. Tifa felt herself going cold when the gun came out.

The Turk ignored her, and quickly and efficiently removed the bullets from the gun, something Tifa had definitely not been expecting. The Turk slipped the bullets into her left pocket, then reached into her right pocket, and pulled out new bullets. Tifa stared in confusion as the Turk, with the same smooth efficiency, loaded her gun with the other bullets.

Once the gun was loaded, the Turk leveled the gun at Tifa and fired so quickly it was almost as if she hadn't even had to take the time to aim.

Mind-numbing pain ripped through Tifa's shoulder as the bullet passed through, strong enough that she bit through her lip again, but then came the crazy thing--it was almost as if she was healing as quickly as the bullet was tearing through her. A moment later, the pain was only a throbbing memory of pain, and the wound had closed itself up.

"Isn't that a neat little bit of work?" the young Turk said with a smile, resting her hand with the gun against her shoulder. She looked at Tifa's shoulder, healed but still throbbing, with a kind of pride. "It's because of the casing on the bullets. It's got a special coating the lab rats cooked up just for us Turks," she said, her smile growing wider. "That coating's got Potion in it. I don't know how it works, even though I did help them out with the testing when they were cooking it up, but basically it means the bullet heals you up even as it's going through you. So very little bleeding, but still plenty of pain. " The Turk's smile changed; became something dangerous as she walked over. "It means we can keep this up for a nice, long time, and not have to worry about anything nasty, like you bleeding out all over the floor," she said, and poked Tifa's shoulder with the barrel of the gun as she spoke.

"And it also means," she said conversationally as she shifted her grip on her gun so she was holding it by the barrel, "that it puts just a bit of Potion in your system to heal you up quickly. And that makes it easier to do other things," she said, and then struck Tifa across the face with the butt of the gun.

Tifa would have gritted her teeth at the pain, but the dim suspicion that would make it _worse_ kept her from it. And the Turk had been right; she could feel the worst of the jaw that had just broken knitting itself back together, just enough to make it a half-healed break instead of a fresh one.

The next shot she got, this one tidily between her ribs so it only ripped through her lung, was enough to heal her jaw up enough so she could talk. "Way to go, ShinRa technology," Tifa said, glaring at the Turk.

The Turk tutted, shaking her head slightly. "Hey, did you ever want kids?" she asked conversationally. "Too bad," she said, and shot Tifa low in the left side of her abdomen. The pain was blinding, and Tifa wondered if the bullet had gone completely through her. It felt like it had, and she felt a strange jolt of anger that, thanks to Shinra, she knew what it was like to have something from a weapon go completely through her--first a sword, now a bullet. "Well, you still might be able to have them one day. Only down fifty percent now," she said. "Want to make it zero?" she asked, and shifted her gun just the slightest bit to the right.

Tifa felt another flare of rage, and all but spat out her next words. "It's not like you're going to let me out of here alive anyway."

The Turk laughed. "Oh, if only you were so lucky," she said, and fired again, this time aiming higher. "Tell me just what it is that you've _seen_ ," she said, narrowing her eyes. "And then give me names. As many names as you can, and _maybe_ you'll walk out of here alive one day."

The pain was bad, the bullet to her gut, but not nearly as bad as what she had felt when the SOLDIERs destroyed her home, or the few moments of lucidity on the trip to Midgar. Compared to that, she told herself, this was nothing.

She had been living on borrowed time anyway. She should have died that day, in Nibelheim. And as much as she'd wanted revenge, wanted to tear ShinRa down with her bare hands...Zangan had been right, and she had made the worst mistake she'd ever made when she'd left in a rage.

More blood dribbled down the side of her mouth, from when she had bitten into her lip at the pain, and she licked at it without thinking about it, the coppery sharpness of the taste hitting her fresh.

ShinRa had taken her home, her family, everything she had known, and now they wanted to take her future from her as well. But there was one thing they couldn't take from her--that they could never take from her.

Without a second thought but with the taste of blood in her mouth, Tifa raised her jaw and said the words that damned her.

"I'm from _Nibelheim_ ," she spat out angrily. "And I _remember_ what Sephiroth, what the SOLDIERs, what _ShinRa_ actually did there, for all you bastards tried to cover it up. I know what _all_ of you all are. So I will never help you or give you _anyone_. _Never._ So just kill me now like you killed my everyone in my home, because I'll die before I help you."

"I was afraid you'd say something like that," the Turk said with a sigh. She shook her head. "You martyr types are always the worst," she grumbled, and then hit Tifa with Sleep.

\--

The entire network was monitored.

Oh, not personally--Hojo had no time for such ridiculous things, he had important work to do. And because he was a busy man, he had long ago set up the network to alert him to certain things.

One thing he had it set to do was to flag him if information from two locations of interest were entered into the network--he'd inserted some code (quite subtle code--not that the idiots who were in charge of keeping the networks secure would have ever even noticed it had it been a clumsy hack instead of the lovely bit of code he had worked on in his spare time) to flag information and to alert him.

Nibelheim and Gongaga.

Two of his current samples had been raised in those areas. The one from Gongaga was oddly enough the most promising, though Hojo was unsure why. It had risen all the way to SOLDIER 1st even though it hadn't been exposed to JENOVA cells or DNA prior to being placed into the SOLDIER program. Hojo had several theories as to why, but without a larger sample size, it was impossible to test them. So he had Gongaga flagged in the system, and waited for when a chance for new samples would come his way.

Nibelheim, of course, was more obvious. He'd had several samples from Nibelheim at this point, and while all of them had been dismal failures to some extent--especially the pathetic specimen he'd acquired with the one from Gongaga (a pity, that one--he'd had high hopes for it, since it had managed to defeat S)--but all had given excellent data in other ways, thanks to long-term mako exposure granting them all rather interesting reactions to mako. The failed clone had not been the only one reduced to a blank by mako, and others had become far more malleable than normal on a genetic level, making them prime for studying new techniques for genetic manipulation. The problem of course, was they were all simply wiped clean by the mako.

Aside from it rendering them useless, drooling husks, however, they all showed incredible reactions to everything else. Most of them, sadly, had had to be put down when his attempts to find ways to un-drooling husk them created instead slathering monsters, but still. There was something promising about samples from Nibelheim, and Hojo wanted a 'clean' sample from there to use for his newest idea for a way to recreate an Ancient while reducing the effects of the mako sensitivity (he was saving the one sample he had left from Nibelheim in hopes of being able to revive it once he unlocked the reasons for the sensitivity beyond the obvious mental weakness). He had a wonderful new theory, but no way to test it.

...until now. The system had sent him a notification, and as he read through the files that had been copied over--it _was_ a lovely bit of code--he felt a smile growing on his face.

A young female from Nibelheim, of an age within only two years of the last surviving Ancient ShinRa knew of, claiming to remember what ShinRa had done--meaning as a potential sample, it wouldn't be one of the useless samples from 'Nibelheim' that had cluttered up the place after ShinRa replaced the town--and had a scar with dimensions that exactly matched that of S's sword. So not only was it sure a pure 'Nibelheimerin,' as the women there were called, but one that had survived an actual meeting with Sephiroth and had been strong enough to escape both Sephiroth and the ShinRa 'cleaning crew,' and was strong-willed enough to act as a terrorist against ShinRa because of all of it.

The smile on his face widened, and he began to _laugh_.

\--

"Reno," Tseng said, and the way he said it - that creepily quiet way Tseng had of sounding completely calm in way that also sounded like he might be about thirty second from ripping out your spleen and wearing it for a hat or something - made Reno actually take his feet off his desk and sit up straight.

"Yeah?" Reno said.

Tseng paused. "Where is Rude?" he asked, frowning slightly.

"Takin' a piss," Reno said with a shrug. "Had, like, three cups of coffee this mornin'."

A slight look of disapproval at Reno's bluntness crossed Tseng's face, but Reno didn't pay it any mind - the boss got that look on his face a lot, and it wasn't like he'd never seen anyone pissing. They were fuckin' Turks; Reno'd bet his whole next paycheck Tseng had made more than one guy piss his pants.

"When he gets back, the two of you meet me in my office. We have an assignment," Tseng said.

Reno raised his eyebrows. It was one thing for Tseng to send him and Rude out - they usually only got hauled out for the bigger assignments - but for Tseng to be going _with_ them...

Reno sat up straight at his desk, leaning forward slightly. "So what it is?" he said. "Gotta big, for it to be all of us."

Tseng's face didn't change - much. But there was a faint creasing at his brow, right where that little dot was, and that right there was not a good sign.

"Nothing major. Just a little pick up," Tseng said. "My office, ten minutes," he said and walked out, and Reno sighed.

Oh, yeah. This was something _big_.

\--

Tifa looked up with she heard the sound of the door opening. She had no idea how much time had passed. It had all quickly turned into a series of meals and interrogations and then silence. She'd been put in some kind of solitary confinement and left there.

She supposed a week had passed since she'd spoken to any one, but it was only a guess, and based on the number of times the lights had been turned off for what she assumed was 'night,' but those had seemed all too short, and if she tried to sleep any other times, it was as if some sadist would blast the loudest noises they could.

She wondered if this was another way they were using to try and get her to break and tell them what they wanted.

Tifa let out a sharp hiss and went into fighting stance without thought when she saw who it was, adrenaline shooting through her and scraping through the bone weariness she felt.

The Turk laughed. "Not a smart idea, Lockheart. And don't worry. I'm not here to talk to you, " she said, and her voice was too cheerful on the 'talk.' "No, you're getting a little transfer," she said, and Tifa didn't like her smile. "And you're _finally_ going to do some _good_ for society.

"Say good-night," the Turk said with a sharkish grin, and the Sleep that hit Tifa was fully mastered, and she was blessedly out before she hit the floor.

\--

They found her where Tseng knew they would, her church.

And as always, she led them on a chase, through the church and up.

But Tseng knew her - knew her better than she had any idea she did, and he was waiting for her at the top.

 _I'm sorry Zack_ , he thought, when she all but ran into him as she ran from Reno and Rude.

\--

When Tifa woke, she was definitely in a very different place than the cell she had been in.

It was still a cell, but it at least had a door that let her see out through bars, unlike the thick, metal door with only a slot they had occasionally slipped food in through. It was also much larger, big enough for two people.

She felt disoriented still, from the Sleep, and she rubbed her face.

The Sleep had helped, as loathe as she was to admit it, but it wasn't enough. She thought about getting up off of the hard bed, but...but the cell would still be there when she woke up, she thought, smiling faintly with a bitter edge.

"I will get out of this," she whispered, and closed her eyes. "I _am_ stronger than this, and I will get out of this," she said again, because she wouldn't let Zangan have been _right_.

\--

"Oy, wakey-wakey, Sleeping Princess!" a voice yelled mockingly, enough to wake Tifa - especially when the door opened.

By now, she knew the door opening to her cell was never good, and it woke her quickly, and she was on her feet quickly.

She wasn't quite expecting for a young women about her age to be shoved into the open door. "You girls play nice," the red-haired Turk said with a grin, and shut the door. Two other Turks where there, but they said nothing. Tifa glared at them, far more wary of people in black suits than of a girl in a pastel dress.

They didn't react, just looked at them both for a bit, then the one who looked like he could have been from her area of the world, or from Wutai, gave a slight gesture and they all walked away.

When they were gone, Tifa turned her attention to the girl. "So who are you?" Tifa asked, slightly warily. "Which _circle_?"

"Aerith Gainsborough, and circle? What, like my mother's knitting circle?" the woman said with a laugh, and Tifa knew then that whoever this 'Aerith' was, she wasn't in Avalanche - which answered one question while raising others. "I would say 'pleased to meet you,' but given the circumstances, I can't really say I'm that pleased," she said with a faint, self-deprecating smile and a shrug. She waited a beat before she prompted, "And you are...?"

Tifa blinked, slightly surprised. "Oh. Yes. Tifa. Tifa Lockheart," she said quickly, which a perfunctory bow more out of habit than politeness; a habit she hadn't been able to shake the whole time she lived in Midgar, no matter how much it had made the Midgarites snicker at how country she was.

Tifa hadn't really cared--she didn't want to be a Midgarite in the first place.

"Oh Yes Tifa Tifa Lockheart. I'll be sure to remember that."

"Why are you here?" Tifa asked bluntly, and the woman, Aerith, went a little wide-eyed at her tone. Tifa didn't care. She didn't care about a lot of things, and how she came across to someone who very well might be another Turk trying to get information out of her was one of them.

"I expect because they want to study me," Aerith said softly, suddenly serious. "And you?"

"Why would they want to study you?" Tifa said in confusion--of all the things she had figured the girl would say, that _wasn't_ one of them. "Isn't this another jail cell?"

"Oh, dear," Aerith said, biting her lip. "You really _don't_ know where we are now, do you?"

Tifa's eyes narrowed. "Start making sense. _Now_."

Aerith looked slightly taken aback, but then she spoke, and her voice was oddly gentle. "We're in the ShinRa building in Midgar. In the upper section. The science section."

"The _science_ section?" Tifa said, boggling. "But...what? Why?" she said, completely confused. That didn't make any sense at all. Why would they have moved _her_ into the science section? And why under the Heavens would a science section have _cells_?

"Because they're going to experiment on us," Aerith said flatly, and Tifa stared at her dumbfounded for a moment before she shook her head.

"That...that is... _ridiculous_ ," she said. "This...this is some other kind of trick. Like them not letting me sleep. You're another Turk, aren't you?" she snapped, and ran to the doors. She grabbed the bars and shook the door so hard it rattled, but it stayed. "You...you bastards can just give up now! I won't give you any names!"

She yelled until she realized how much of a waste of time it had been, and she turned back to 'Aerith.'

"I'm not a Turk," Aerith said softly, and Tifa let out a disgusted noise and flopped back on her bed.

"You don't believe me?" she said suddenly.

"After everything they did to me before putting me in here," Tifa said stiffly, " _no_. I don't trust you at _all_."

Aerith frowned. "Everything they--?" she began, and Tifa shut her up by sitting up and lifting her shirt.

Aerith let out a sharp gasp, and Tifa let the shirt drop. Oh, she'd healed up cleanly, with the Cures they'd been so nice as to use on her...but wounds still scarred, no matter how fast you did a Cure on them, if they were major enough. Her entire abdomen was covered now in fine, circular bullet wounds so new they were still shiny.

The girl let out a sudden, surprised gasp. "Your hand, what's...oh," she ended with another gasp, staring at her own hand. Tifa looked to see what she was staring at, and saw there was a a neat black tattoo of even letters on the back of Aerith's hand, Cured but still raised slightly red.

She looked down at her own, and her eyes went wide.

They stared wide-eyed at their hands, before they looked wide-eyed at each other.

XVIII  
XVIII-A

Aerith swallowed before she spoke, her face bloodless. "I think we're in trouble," Aerith said, and her voice wavered.

Tifa nodded. "I think you're right," she said, and there was a quaver in her voice as well.

\--

_The problem with the subjects from the town of N is that long-term exposure to mako has, contrary to expectations, made them more susceptible to the more negative symptoms, such as loss of awareness of self. However, this susceptibility to mako has also meant they respond extremely well to other properties of it as well._

_My current theory is that the apparent mako-induced loss of self may not be simple weakness (although a weaker mind will, of course, have more pronounced effects) but may be a way of countering the way that mako can induce mental instability. The area around N has tales of 'Ohnegesichterin,' or "the faceless maidens," which all involve girls getting lost in Mt. Nibel and becoming a kind of hungry demon, which makes me think that this is a stand-in for those who have lost all sense of self from the naturally-occurring mako fountains there. Since the demons in the story are always looking for a new face so they can become human again, and similar stories (the のっぺら尼, 'nopperani') are found in an area of Wutai thought to have a similar mako pool, I wondered if this might mean that the 'faceless' one is trying to find someone to imprint on (ignoring, of course, how the person whose face they steal dies in the Nibelheim versions; since this is a tale to frighten children from the woods, there is no reason, if my theory holds, that the so-called Ohnegesichterin would need a death to occur for imprinting to take hold)._

_To test this, I will try to induce 'imprinting' by the new sample from N on the Ancient sample that has recently been acquired. With luck, this will result not in a sample that has lost all sense of self, but one that will replace their 'self' with that of an Ancient. To achieve this, once genetic splicing has begun, both samples will be placed in the same mako tank (for controlled amounts of time; given the now-verified susceptibility of subject from N to mako poisoning when suspended long-term in the tanks and the resulting failures, attempts will be made to minimize the severity and speed on onset). Subject XVIII will be exposed to compound 164 in order to induce susceptibility by way of natural compounds that induce Confuse while at the same time sedating so the sample will not damage itself or the Ancient sample. While in a heightened state of susceptibility, proximity to another may either speed the imprinting process, or retard the loss of self, either of which will be wholly satisfactory results, one of which may be a way to 'salvage' the other failed N sample._

Hojo's notes on subject XVIII, p. 2

\--

Aerith had tried to talk to her, but Tifa just stared at her hand, and Aerith had finally given up, almost gratefully. She didn't think she could really manage anything right then, even though part of her desperately craved distraction.

Something also told her - that same quiet, still voice she could often hear when she really _listened_ \- that trying to draw anything out of Tifa right then. She wanted nothing more, right then, to go over and wrap her arms around this strange girl who seemed so angry and so fragile and so close to breaking after going through only the gods themselves knew, but she didn't; she wrapped her arms around herself instead and tried not to let herself think too deeply about what this all meant.

She had only the vaguest of memories of the ShinRa labs, almost as few as of the mother and father who had died trying to escape. She suspected it was a good thing, that she remembered so little of the place and more of her mother's words to her. But she remembered how fervent her mother had been to escape, and she remembered a tiny fragment of hushed conversation between her parents, of "professor" and "start on Aerith," and panicked whispered of things a tiny child had no way of understanding or being able to remembered because of it. But those fragments were enough; she knew her parents had risked their lives - had given their lives - to get Aerith out before whatever the scientists had been doing to her mother could be done to her.

She wouldn't lie, not even to herself - she was terrified. Terrified of what it meant, terrified of what they might do to her.

It wasn't just for Tifa's sake that Aerith wanted to hug her; wanted to hold tight to _someone_ and not be _alone_ with the weight of it.

She wondered how long before it started, and in an almost perverse kind of cosmic timing, she heard footsteps coming down the hall.

They both, she and Tifa, looked up at the door when two men in the white lab coats and two helmeted troopers stopped in front of them.

The older one in glasses smiled, and Aerith felt something in her twist at it, and she had in impression of things twisted and rotten at the sight of him. She couldn't explain it; but she felt the still and small voice, though silent, recoil at him.

"Excellent," he said, nodding, and then turned to the other man. "XVIII is to be given 164 after the sedative course I spoke of before. Then insertions for both, for one hour to begin with," he said. "Be careful of XVIII, because I have been warned it is quite feisty," he said, and the 'it' put Aerith on edge. "I will not see my precious samples damaged unless absolutely necessary, especially since it could add unforeseen variables," he said sternly, and Aerith knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that he had no care at all for their well-being.

"Yes, professor," the other man said, and Aerith went stiff.

"See to it, then. I will double check the tank solutions. Deliver the samples in ten minutes," he said, and the other scientist nodded once, and the professor walked on ahead.

The scientist who remained looked at them both curiously, and his gaze lingered for a bit too long on Tifa, who was ignoring him.

He cleared his throat. "Now, I don't want any trouble," he said, then swallowed at whatever look it was Tifa gave him.

 _Good_ , Aerith thought to herself. _She's still got fight left in her. We're going to need it._

"OK, then," he said, then raised his arm and fired off a Materia.

Tifa barely had time to react before the magic hit her, and then it was almost instantly obvious what he'd hit her with, by the way her eyes went unfocused and she started looking around in a panic.

"A _Confuse_?!" Aerith yelled, barely believing her eyes. "How is that a _sedative_?!" she said, feeling panicked, and hoping she be able to stay out of the way if Tifa felt she was under attack and started to attack her.

"Um," the scientist said, then gestured at the troopers. "You two. Secure them," he said, gesturing now at Tifa and Aerith, then opening the cell door. " _Carefully_."

Tifa certainly did have fight left in her, but it was unfocused now, and one of the troopers, after she knocked the other one into one of the beds so hard it shattered, wrestled her down when she leapt at Aerith in her blindness from the Confuse, and strapped her down to the remaining bed, which was when Aerith noticed for the first time that the beds had _restraining straps_.

The scientist rushed in once Tifa was restrained, and only the other trooper, who had gotten up and now had his rifle out, stopped Aerith from rushing over and trying to stop him once he got over to Tifa and pulled out a needle.

"You, keep her steady," he said to the trooper who had wrestled Tifa down, who nodded once, and he held Tifa steady as the scientist slid the needle into her arm.

It was almost terrifying how quickly Tifa went still, and now Aerith rushed over, the trooper with his rifle on her be damned.

Tifa's eyes were still unfocused, and her breathing was quick, a sure sign of a Confuse, but she was no longer in a panic. Aerith didn't know what this was.

"Bring them down to the insertion room," the scientist said, wiping his brow with his lab coat sleeve, and the trooper with the rifle harnessed it on his back, and grabbed Aerith's arm roughly.

"This way, miss," he said, and his voice was far kinder than the grip on her arm.

Aerith's lip trembled, but she refused to cry. _Refused_.

She looked back as he escorted her out, and them undoing the straps and hauling Tifa up.

 _Mama_ , she thought, a Blizzard in her stomach, _I think I understand now_.

\--

_"Ich will nicht!" Tifa yells angrily in Narslandische. "Ich will nicht vergessen! Ich werde nicht vergessen!"_

_The open-handed slap Zangan gives her across her mouth is the first and only time he has ever_ struck _her. Yes, she has been hit by him many times when she is training, but this is different; this is something devastating in a way that none of the bruises she's ever gotten from being taught to fight have ever been, and the taste of blood in her mouth now is unlike all of the other times she has tasted it._

_"You speak using words that have vanished from this world," he says sharply. "Never speak them again, unless you wish to vanish as well."_

_Zangan walks away from her angrily, and that day is the last that she ever speaks in dialect again._  
  
\--

The smell of mako was still sharp in her nose when the troopers brought them back to their cell. The world was a little sharper, a little brighter, and she couldn't help but remember Zack's bright eyes, the most amazing she'd ever seen..and what they were proof of.

He'd been missing for so long now. She didn't want to think he was gone, but...

 _There are no 'buts_ ,' she told herself firmly. _If he were dead...I would know._

She pushed her doubts away, and looked over at Tifa, and felt another Blizzard being cast in her belly.

Tifa...Tifa wasn't all right.

She still had that strange Confused-but-not look to her, and was just standing where she had been left by the trooper, staring out at nothing.

"Tifa," Aerith said, and her voice wavered at first. She firmed it quickly, because she suspected now would be a _terrible_ time to give Tifa even the tiniest inkling of the fear Aerith was beginning to feel. "Tifa?" she asked, going over to the other woman and taking her hand to get her attention.

Tifa blinked once, and Aerith was grateful for that much of a response. "Tifa, are you...?" she begin, and Tifa blinked again, slowly, seeing nothing, and then, more disconcerting to Aerith than anything else, she let out a strange sound, one that is almost a word, then stops, and a single tear welled up in her eyes and splashed out.

Just one. And then nothing.

Aerith gave up, gave into the urge she'd had before and wrapped her arms tight around Tifa.

Tifa didn't respond, not at first, but then some of the terrifying tension seemed to drain out of her.

Aerith dragged Tifa down to the floor with her, and sat, cradling Tifa against her. "Ssh, ssh," Aerith said, stroking Tifa's hair with trembling hands. Tifa rested her head against Aerith's chest, her eyes wide and unseeing, and Aerith knew that somehow, someway, she had to get them out of there.

\--

 _"They can forget," Ayumi said. "But I can't."_  
"Of course not," Aomame said.  
"It's like the genocides throughout history."  
"Genocide?"  
"The ones who do it, they can think up reasons to rationalize it, and they can forget. They can turn away from the things they don't want to see. But the ones it happened to, they can't forget. They can't turn away. That memory is passed down from parent to child. And what we call 'the world,' Aomame, is a battle that will never end between one set of memories and the memories on the other side."  
-Haruki Murakami, 1Q84 Book 1


	3. That Desolate, Arid Place

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tifa does not trust her. Tifa does not trust anyone, not in this place.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is for illumynare, who won my help_japan auction. :D  She made an incredibly generous bid, and as someone actually living in Japan, I am extremely grateful.  Also, I'd ask that if you enjoyed this fic, to please consider donating to $5 or so to a charity.  It doesn't really matter which one, but it'd be a way for the spirit of help_japan--and all of the help_* auctions--to keep going.  
>    
> For the sake of brevity, I'm cutting out the extensive author's notes I actually wrote for this--if you are interested, I'll be posting them separately, as an Ultimania. :D  
>    
> Also, ahahaha, I didn't figure it would take so long to get another part out; I have been having a hell of a year - between work, studying, and injuries (including one that left me unable to type without pain for several months) & doctor trips (woo-hoo, rare collagen disorders~ asdfghjkl;:), I haven't had much time to work on it. Sowwy! ^^;;

\--  
   


Part II:   
荒れ果てた潤いのない場所  
[That Desolate, Arid Place]

   
\--  
   
  
私という存在の核心にあるのは無ではない。荒れ果てた潤いのない場所でもない。  
    -村上春樹、1Q84 Book 2  
  
   
\--   
   
They sat like that for so long Aerith's legs went numb.  
   
She didn't even notice.  
   
She would have given anything, as she waited and held on to Tifa, to have had a Cure or have been so exhausted that a limit break came out.  She felt it, then, deeply in her bones, that she truly was only half a Cetra; that she lacked an ability she felts her mother must have had, to have been able to fix whatever tendril of _wrong_ that was beginning to snake its way into Tifa.   
   
But it was something she couldn't do, for all she could feel it.  All she could do was hold on to the other woman and wait for her to come back from whatever place it was she had gone. And to pray, more than she ever had in her life, that they would somehow find a way out.  
   
It seemed like forever before Tifa finally moved or made a sound, but she finally let out a faint "nngh," and shifted slightly.  
   
"Tifa?" Aerith said slowly, feeling both relieved and filled with dread at the same time.  
   
"Nn," Tifa let out softly, then exhaled heavily.  
   
"Take your time," Aerith said, her voice gentle, rubbing Tifa's back.   _Everything is going to be fine,_ Aerith told herself.   _Tifa is fine. Nothing...nothing bad could have happened this fast anyway.  
   
I hope._  
   
"No...no, I think I'm OK," Tifa said after a moment, sounding tired and groggy, and as if she was waking up from a deep sleep.  She let out a long sigh, and didn't lift her head. "What...what happened?"  
   
That didn't sound like a good sign, but Aerith knew no good would come of panicking. _Plus_ , she thought, _they hit her with a Confuse before whatever under the Heavens they did to us_.  
   
Best, she decided, to go with the mildest truth of what she did know.  
   
"Do you remember what happened before the Confuse?"  
   
Tifa frowned slightly, then pulled herself up, away from Aerith and sat across from her.  "I remember...there was...yeah," she said again, brushing her hair out of her face.  "There were...men, right?  Scientists...troopers."  
   
Aerith nodded.  
   
"OK.  Yeah.  I remember everything before that..jerk hit me with whatever it was.  A Confuse.  Bastard," she muttered under her breath, and something about the way she said it made Aerith think Tifa didn't curse very often.  
   
_ShinRa will do that to a person_ , she thought.   
   
"After that, it's all a giant muddle," Tifa said, shaking her head.  "Odin's breath, it still feels like a muddle," she said,sighing and rubbing her temple.  "Like...like I just can't completely shake the Confuse. Just kind of _off_ ," she finished, trailing off and her shoulders hunching in as she wrapped her arms around herself.  "What under the Heavens are they going to do to us? What _did_ they do?"  
   
Aerith looked at her hands.  She folded them on her lap when Tifa'd sat up, and without thinking, she'd put her left hand on top of her right, and the clean, black lines of the XVIII-A tattoo screamed out at her.  
   
She covered it with her other hand, and it seemed _wrong_ , somehow, how the tattooed skin felt the same under her fingers as the rest of her.

"You probably don't want to know," she said softly, and Tifa flinched almost as if Aerith's words had slapped her.  Then Tifa narrowed her eyes and lifted her jaw.  
   
"Doesn't matter if I want to know or not," she said, and there was a flash of strength in them.  Then she blinked and made a face.  "Ugh. I smell like someone shoved me in the mako fountains in Mt. Nibel!" she said, wrinkling her nose.  
   
Aerith blinked.  "I don't know Mt. Nibel, but you're not too far off about being shoved in a mako fountain," she said, and Tifa stared at her.  "They put us in a tank of mako. Then...I don't know, something knocked me out after put us in."  
   
"What under the Heavens...!" Tifa said, sounding dumbfounded.  " _Why_?! Don't they know how dangerous--!"  
   
"They do," Aerith said softly.  "They know _exactly_ what mako can do."  
   
Tifa's eyes went wide.  "I," she said slowly, "have got to get out of here. I'm not gonna be ShinRa's lab rat!"  
   
Aerith frowned. "Hey, what about me?"  
   
Tifa's eyes narrowed suddenly.  "I still don't know if I can trust you," she said, a sudden edge to her voice.  "I don't remember them hitting you with a Confuse," she said, and there was something so sharp and cold in her voice Aerith flinched at it. "And how do you know that ShinRa knows what mako can do?" Tifa said suspiciously.  
   
It stung, more than a little, but Aerith couldn't really blame Tifa for her wariness - she'd seen those scars.  But _still_...  
   
They were going to be stuck in here, with ShinRa doing only the gods knew what to them while they were, and the only chance they had of getting out was to work together.  Aerith held up her left hand.  "You saw this, right?" she said, and pointed to the tattoo, and Tifa flinched this time.  "I'm in this, same as you.  I don't know where they got you from or why, but they just...they just snatched me up, right out of the old church I always used as a safe place. I thought I'd gotten away, but...They had just been playing with me, all these years and letting me think I could get away if they really wanted me," she said, hating each word and her own stupidity over the years. 

She'd always laughed it off when ShinRa was watching, telling her mother it'd be OK and they hadn't once caught her yet because she was always careful.  "My mother must be so worried," she said, more to herself than to Tifa, and her voice cracked.  She hadn't even thought about her mother until just then, but now that she had...Aerith didn't even know how long it had been, she she guessed it had been close to a day, at least, probably more, and the idea of her mother waiting and waiting for her to come home...  
   
She wondered if Tseng would at least have the decency to tell her mother something.  She thought he would, but...  
   
She sniffled suddenly, and blinked quickly, but she could feel the tears welling up in her eyes. _Stupid, stupid, stupid, all these years, I was so_ stupid.  
   
"I've got to get some sleep," Tifa muttered. "Look.  We'll...we'll talk after I've gotten some sleep.  They kept me pretty sleep deprived until they dumped me in here, and I can't think," she said, her voice small, and Tifa suddenly seemed different, almost like another person, and Aerith wondered if that was a glimpse of who Tifa _had_ been, before whatever made her into someone so angry and mistrusting had happened.

...She'd seen those scars. And those came _after_ whatever had made her into a terrorist.  
   
"Go ahead," Aerith said with a sigh.  "They were nice enough to fix the bed that got broken while we were in the mako tanks," she said, and the giggle that came out to that sounded mad even to her own ears.  
   
Tifa gave her a long look, the moment of vulnerability gone, replaced with wariness again, then shook her head.  "Which one's mine?" she said.  
   
"I really don't think they bothered to assign them," Aerith said, with another insane grin fighting to come to her lips. If she didn't watch it, she was going to start laughing, and then she'd be sobbing uncontrollably, and she didn't want that. She could feel her nerves fraying, and she tamped down to control them before they shattered out of her control.  
   
"Then I'm taking the one on the left," Tifa said slowly, still wary, and laid down without another word, facing the wall and her back to both the cell and Aerith.

The mad urge to laugh until she sobbed came back, and never had Aerith felt so alone, or wanted so much to go _home_.  
   
\--  
   
Tifa opened her eyes slowly, feeling not quite awake, but finally not bone-crushingly exhausted.  It had been what felt like far too long since she'd felt anything like rested, and this seemed like the closest she had been in as long as she could remember.  She closed her eyes again and sighed before rolling onto her back and stretching.  
   
Reality, though, crashed in on her as soon as she opened her eyes again and saw the unfamiliar ceiling that was so much like the ones in the cells she had been in, but different.  
   
"No," she said, and sat up.  
   
"'Fraid so, and good morning," Aerith said from the other side of the room.  Aerith was sitting on her bed, not doing anything. "Or something like that. It might be closer to afternoon."  
   
"How long was I asleep?" Tifa asked.  The inside of her mouth felt like something had died in it, and she wanted a glass of water, a bathroom, a shower, and a toothbrush in whatever order she could get them.  
   
"About a day," Aerith said, and Tifa's eyes went wide.  "I thought you probably needed the sleep," she said with a faint shrug.  "Plus, they didn't come for us, so I figured it was better to let you get some rest while you could.  We're going to need our strength."  
   
"This isn't a bad dream, is it," Tifa said flatly.  
   
"I wish it were," Aerith said softly, and something about the way the other woman looked down at her hands made Tifa begin to suspect she wasn't just some ShinRa agent in her to trick her into giving up names of other members of AVALANCHE, that maybe Aerith was in this just as much as she was.  
   
_Or maybe she's a good actress_ , Tifa thought.  _They didn't shoot her up with Confuse or inject her with weird whatevers. I can't trust her. I can't trust_ anyone _here_.  
   
"Bathroom?" Tifa finally said, and the corner of Aerith's lip turned up in something almost like a bitter smile.  Then she gestured towards the corner of the cell furthest away from the door.  
   
"Oh, no way," Tifa said wide-eyed, shaking her head.  There was a small metal toilet in the corner, and a small sink with two plastic cups, two toothbrushes, toothpaste, a small bar of soap, and a roll of toilet paper on it next to the toilet.  
   
"I'll just look at the wall until you're done," Aerith said, pinking slightly, and Tifa felt her whole face flame red as Ifrit's flame.  
   
There was no going around it, though, and Tifa tried not to think about it too hard as she went over to the metal toilet.  
   
Tifa was no stranger to embarrassment, but this, having not even the semblance of privacy for something like this, made her wish a hole would open up in the floor and just swallow her whole.  
   
She hated ShinRa.  
   
When she was done, the flush sounded loud to her ears - but not as loud as the splashes from using the toilet had felt - and she washed her hands, feeling hollow.  That hollow feeling remained as she brushed her teeth, then filled the cup and drank down the oddly metallic-tasting water that came out of the tap.  
   
She dried her hands on her skirt before looking around the cell, looking at anything rather than look at Aerith just yet.  
   
It was bigger than the cells she'd been in up until then.  She'd been in solitary confinement cells until then, and those had barely had room enough for a bed and the damnable toilet in the corner. This cell, though, had clearly been designed to hold two people, even if there wasn't all that much room. The corner with the toilet and the sink, two beds, and nothing else. There was room enough to move around, but not by much, and nothing there for them to do.  
   
Tifa paced for a bit in the small area, glad enough for at least that, before she stopped and wrapped her arms around herself.  
   
"So...um...so, tell me about yourself," Tifa said, needing something get rid of the awkwardness and humiliation she was feeling just then.  She didn't know anything about this girl she'd been tossed in with, and only the gods knew how long this would last.  
   
She could hear how forced it was and felt even more pathetic for it, but she figured better this awkwardness than just silence.  
   
"Well, what do you want to know?" Aerith asked, turning now to face Tifa.  She was sitting cross-legged on her bed, her skirt loose enough to allow it.  "I mean, I'm just a flower seller."  
   
"Yeah, and I'm just a bartender," Tifa said flatly, narrowing her eyes. Something didn't make sense at all - 'just a flower seller' nothing.  If Aerith was there, it was because either ShinRa wanted her to disappear, or she was working for them.  
   
She'd thought Zangan a coward for constantly running from ShinRa; now she realized he had known something she didn't, something she was learning more of every day they had her.  She already knew how treacherous they were; had seen them rebuild and repopulate Nibelheim all in under a few months to cover what Sephiroth had done.  
   
She'd gotten the wrong lesson when Zangan had rubbed her face in what they did, she knew that now. Zangan had been trying to _warn_ her, and she'd...  
   
...She couldn't trust this girl.  
   
"You said something about this not being a jail.  That they were going to experiment on us. What did you mean?"  
   
Aerith stared at her and blinked a few times.  "I meant exactly that.  They're going to experiment on us.  I think they already started."  
   
"And you know all that _how_?"  
   
Aerith lifted her jaw. "Because I was born in one of their labs.  They experimented on my mother. She escaped with me and my father, one of the scientists, when I was five. That's how I know."  
   
Tifa sucked in a breath, taken aback. That was not an answer she'd been expecting. Then shook her head.  No.  She couldn't trust as neat and tidy a story as that. Not yet. "They didn't come after you?"  
   
"Of course they did," Aerith snapped.  "Both my parents were killed when we escaped. My biological mother left me with the woman who raised me. And the Turks came by often enough to let us know they knew where I was." She shrugged. "I guess they decided I wasn't important enough to recapture since my mother was dead. Until now."  
   
"That...doesn't make much sense."  
   
"Well, I wasn't the one they were experimenting on at the time. For all they knew, I was useless to them.  They were watching me the whole time to see if I would be, I guess, and it looked like they finally decided I was," Aerith said, and the words sounded bitter.  
   
Tifa looked down at her hands, torn between wanting to believe Aerith and wariness.  It could go either way. It really was a matter of how important she was - she'd been important enough for them to capture alive and torture days on end for information, but was she worth this much of a facade?  
   
...but ShinRa was so, SO very good at facades.  She wouldn't have thought Nibelheim worth the effort they'd gone through, either.  Zangan's home, they'd wiped off the map so completely it was as if it had never existed, but hers...  
   
"Here," Aerith said, taking something out of her pocket and holding it out.  "It's not much, but it's all I could keep.  They took your tray of food away when they took mine, even though you'd been sleeping and hadn't eaten."  
   
At the sight of the small roll, Tifa's stomach suddenly burst into life.  She suddenly felt so hungry she could have eaten her own arm off, and she felt a wave of gratitude wash over her before she squashed it as hard as she could.  
   
"Thank you," she said, bowing slightly without realizing it in a motion engrained in her since childhood as she reached for the roll.  
   
"They should be back something in an hour or two.  Try to hold on until then," Aerith said gently.  
   
"I've gone without before," Tifa said shrugging.  "And this'll take the edge off."  
   
"Things must have been hard for you," Aerith said gently, and Tifa shrugged again as she took a bite.  The bread was pretty terrible, dry and hard and nothing like the thick, heavy breads from home, but right then, she didn't care.  It was bread, and that at least was something.  
   
"You don't become a terrorist for no reason," Tifa said after she swallowed, and a faint, sad smile touched Aerith's lips.  
   
"No," she said, "I suppose you don't."  
   
They fell silent, and Tifa ate her bread.  
   
\--  
   
"Both of you, up!" a voice yelled sharply, and Aerith's head jerked up.  
   
Her heart sank.  She had been more bored than she'd ever been in her life, but this wasn't something she wanted to happen.

Tifa all but leapt up from the floor, where she had been doing exercises.  Aerith had watched her for awhile, feeling lazy and a bit pudgy at first, then in mild disbelief as Tifa just kept on doing sit-ups past the hundred mark. Her stomach started to hurt just watching Tifa, and watching someone exercise did get dull after a bit, so she'd started running her fingers through her hair, trying to detangle it as best she could. A hairbrush wasn't among the amenities ShinRa had graced them with, so all she had were her fingers.  
   
So she was detangling as Tifa was counting push-ups, when the troopers and the scientist came.  
   
Tifa had very obviously been trained in some kind of martial art, of that much Aerith was now certain.  Tifa quickly went into a fighting stance with a smooth, practiced grace, and was rewarded by one of the troopers leveling his gun right at her.  
   
"You don't want to do that," he said.  
   
"You don't know anything about what I want to do," Tifa said defiantly, and was rewarded quickly when the trooper, faint trails of a Haste around him, slammed the butt of his gun into her belly a shade too fast for her to block.  
   
"I do know you don't want to piss me off," he said as Tifa gasped. "Trust me on that. Now, are we going to do this the easy way, or the you-regret it way?"  
   
Tifa looked like she wanted to say something, but Aerith jumped in.  "Tifa...no.  Please."  
   
Tifa gave her a hard look, but put her hands in the air.    
   
"Smart girl," the trooper said.  
   
"Drop dead," Tifa said sharply, and this time the butt of the Hasted trooper's gun hit her hard in the jaw.  Tifa let out a sharp, pained cry and clamped her hands over where she'd been hit.  
   
"Don't break the sample!" the scientist said sharply, sounding alarmed.  "If it's injured...I'm not authorized to use any materia besides this on it!" he said.    
   
Aerith had run over to Tifa while this was happening, ignoring the other trooper with this gun trained on her.  Blood was seeping from between Tifa's fingers.  
   
"Let me see," she said softly. Tifa's hands were shaking, but Aerith was able to pull them away from her jaw.  
   
Tifa's broken jaw.  
   
"You cruel bastard!" Aerith said sharply, and the trooper turned his gun on her.   
   
"Now, you already saw what happens when someone gives me lip. Do you need a lesson as well?" he said warningly, and Aerith clinched her jaw so tightly her teeth ground together, clamping down on the angry words that wanted to come screaming out.

"We are on a schedule!" the scientist said in irritation.   
   
"Aren't you going to help her?" Aerith said disbelievingly, not able to hold it in.  
   
He ignored her.  
   
"Both of you, hands where we can see them," the other trooper said.  
   
Tifa's blood was dripping down onto the floor, guns were trained on them both, and Aerith raised her hands.  
   
\--  
   
"What," Hojo snapped angrily, "have you done to my sample?!"  
   
Bennett swallowed thickly.  "She was resisting, and..."  
   
Hojo leveled a stare on him, then pointedly looked at the troopers, their guns, then back to Bennett.  
   
"I do not," Hojo said, his voice sounding just as angry as before, "want to introduce uncontrolled variables into my experiments!" he snapped, then pushed up his glasses, and Bennett felt his stomach dropped. "We have no idea how pain is going to influence the intake of the compound. That is not a test I intended to begin at this early stage! Baselines must be established first!"  
   
"Do...do you want me to Cure her, sir?" Bennett said weakly.  
   
Hojo's eyes narrowed, and Bennett knew he'd said the wrong thing.  "What did I just say about uncontrolled variables? And are you a complete idiot?  A Cure or potion would most likely completely clean all of compound 164 out of her system."  
   
"Wait, wouldn't that take an elixir or an Esu--" Bennett began, and his words dried up quickly at the look on Hojo's face.  
   
"Are you lecturing me on compounds I myself have developed?" he said, his voice no longer angry but almost terrifyingly conversational.  
   
"No, sir," Bennett stammered nervously.  "I was mistaken.  You're right," he said.  
   
"Put them into the tanks.  As they are.  And if those idiotic muscleheads excessively damage my samples again, without my permission and in uncontrolled situations, well," he said, and Bennett could figure out the end to that.  "Oh, and Dr. Bennett," Hojo said, in that same conversational tone, "If I were you, I would hope that today's numbers come out surprisingly well.  The other direction would be...unfortunate," he ended with, the light glinting off his glasses, and Bennett swallowed again, his throat as dry as his hands were damp.  
   
\--  
   
_"Where were you born?" she asks as they hike.  Tifa still tires easily and feels occasional twinges of pain from the time Zangan will not allow her to talk about, and she needs a distraction from the pain that is oddly intense that day.  And it has become a challenge for her now, to drag from Zangan where he is from, to make him admit that he is from a place that had been--because if he does, then it means she can remember Nibelheim, that Tifa has the right to remember.  
   
"The place where my mother was."  
   
"And where was that?"  
   
"The place where she bore me," he answers with a smile, and will say no more. _  
   
\--  
   
Aerith slowly opened her eyes.  She blinked for a few minutes before getting her bearings and sitting up.  The world was sharp, somehow, and clear, and she wondered if it was the mako.  She had no idea how long they'd stuffed her and Tifa in the tanks, but it seemed it was long enough for it to make things seem almost too in-focus.  
   
Was this how Zack had seen--how Zack _saw_ \--the world?  
   
She shook her head to clear it, then looked over at Tifa's bed. Tifa was lying on it, eyes open but not focused on anything, and Aerith felt her stomach drop. "Tifa?"  
   
No answer.  
   
She got up, feeling unsteady, then went over to Tifa's side, and flinched.  
   
Tifa's jaw was still broken.  The blood was gone, but...  
   
"Dear gods, how could they just leave you like this?" Aerith said, shocked.  "I'm sorry," she whispered, and gently prodded Tifa's jaw, to try and do something; to set it if nothing else.  
   
Tifa didn't move at all, just lay there with her eyes staring at nothing, and Aerith fell to her knees by the bed and bowed her head, clasping one of Tifa's hands in hers.  
   
This was not her place; not the church where she could always hear the Planet and focus that still, small voice into life, but she had to try.  
   
_Don't do it_ , a voice warned her. _They'll know for sure what you are and what you can do if you do._

Aerith hesitated, then felt a wave of shame for it. _They already know_ , she thought. _And I am what I am. I won't let them take that away from me._

She took a deep breath, and felt the tendrils of a whisper around her, and focused on it.  She wasn't sure why she could hear it now, but she wasn't going to question it.  That wisp was what she needed, and she felt her hair flutter with the whirling tendrils of power as she pushed herself into a Limit Break.  
   
It was just barely enough in this place and her at only the bare basest level that could trigger a Limit, but it was _enough_ , and that was what mattered.  She couldn't fix the _wrongness_  she could just barely sense in Tifa, but she could fix _this_.  
   
This was not her place. But she was what she was.  
   
She laid her head on the mattress of Tifa's bed and closed her eyes.  
   
\--  
   
Tifa felt like her head had been pulled open, her brains stirred around with a stick, and then her head shut back closed again.  
   
"Ugh," she let out, and slowly sat up, then rubbed her temples, trying to get her brains back in order.  
   
Something stirred by her, and she looked over and down quickly.  Aerith was sitting on the floor by her bed, asleep with one arm on the bed and using it as a pillow.  
   
Tifa's shifting seemed to wake her up, and Aerith looked up at her sleepily. "Are you OK?" she said, rubbing her eyes.  "How's your jaw?"  
   
Tifa frowned for a moment in confusion, then her eyes went wide as she remembered.  She raised her hand to her jaw and cheek gingerly. "It's...it's fine. It's not broken anymore.  It doesn't even hurt," she said.  
   
Aerith let out a sigh of relief.  
   
"Good of them to at least fix that," Tifa said, but the words sounded bitter even to her.   
   
"Yeah," Aerith said, looking at her hands. "It was the least they could do."  
   
"I'd be amazed they did that much," Tifa said, and this time the anger she felt came out, "but they always were good about cleaning up their messes so there was no proof."  She touched her stomach, where the scar from Sephiroth's sword would always be.  They may have been able to erase everything else he'd done, but they'd never be able to erase that from her very skin.    
   
That, or any of the other scars they had left her with.  "Bastards," she hissed under her breath.  
   
"Tifa..." Aerith began, and she looked concerned.  "Are you...what did they...why are you so angry? It's not just this, is it? Or anything they did before...before they put you in here," she said, almost as if she was shying away from saying it.  
   
"Before they tortured me?" she said flatly, and Aerith flinched, but nodded.  
   
"Like that's not enough?" Tifa said, barely even able to believe this.  She had every right to be angry; who was this girl to act otherwise?

"Something made you into a terrorist," Aerith said softly.  Her voice was hesitant, but there was something strong and certain in her eyes.  "You're not even my age, I don't think.  So what happened?  No one just decides out of the blue to try and blow up reactors."  
   
"I joined AVALANCHE," Tifa said, not caring if Aerith was a spy or not, "because I hate ShinRa and everyone connected with them. I hate them, I hate the Turks, I hate the SOLDIERs, I hate all of them.  All of them! Everything connected to this company is rotten to the core!"  
   
"I'm not really a ShinRa fan myself. But they're not all bad," Aerith said, her words slow and careful.  "My...my father worked for them. My boyfriend was...is...was a SOLDIER," she said, frowning slightly. "They're not all bad. And..." she trailed off, biting her lip.  
   
She definitely didn't trust Aerith now.  She covered it with a faint smile.  "Bad breakup or roller coaster or something?"  
   
Aerith smiled, but it didn't seem to reach her eyes. "Something like that.  One day he went out on a mission and never came back," she said simply, and the smile fell off Tifa's face as if she'd been slapped.  
   
That hadn't been the answer she was expecting, and something about the way Aerith looked down at her hands, picking nervously at her skirt, told Tifa that at least some part of what Aerith had said had been true - she recognized the way loss, _real_ loss, looked, and it was written all over Aerith.  
   
"I'm sorry," she said, turning red, and Aerith just shook her head.  
   
"It was years ago," she said softly.  "Three years ago.  One day he left, and just...he never came back."  
   
Tifa's lips quirked up into a smile that held no humor.  "Three years ago, eh?  There's a coincidence."  
   
Aerith gave her a questioning look, and Tifa continued.  "You want to know why I hate ShinRa?  Because three years ago, ShinRa troops and SOLDIERs came to my home town and burned it to the ground.  They killed almost everyone there.  They killed my father," she said, her voice growing softer.  "And almost killed me," she said, and unconsciously touched her stomach, where the first of many scars she had gotten from ShinRa was.  "And then, they erased everything they had done."  
   
"Oh," Aerith said, almost breathlessly in a gasp. "Oh. I'm so sorry."  
   
" _That's_ why I hate ShinRa.  Why I swore to tear them down.  But look how I ended up," Tifa said bitterly. Zangan had been right, and it was like a Poison had been cast on her, the way it ran through her veins. "A captured 'terrorist' and now I'm their lab rat."  
   
"The terrorist and the flower seller," Aerith said with a quirk of her lips. "What an odd pair we make."  
   
"But _why_?" Tifa finally burst out with.  "Why would they want to experiment on you? On us?"  
   
Aerith didn't say anything for a moment, searching carefully for words.  "Have you...have you ever heard of the Cetra?  The Ancients?"  
   
Tifa frowned slightly.  "Kind of. Aren't they some kind of myth or something?"  
   
Aerith smiled sadly.  "No.  They weren't.  They were real.  And I'm the last one. Or the last half one. The last full-blooded Cetra died with my mother.  And the only reason I ever saw the outside of a lab in the first place was because my ShinRa scientist father died trying to get us out."  
   
Tifa's eyes went wide. "Oh," she finally said, and then neither one of them said anything for a long time.  
   
\--  
   
_It would seem that while that idiot assigned to work for me can not keep the trigger-happy troopers in line, he has lucked out - insofar as that moron's attempt to break the only intact Nibelheim sample I have on hand may have opened up a new vector for it to imprint on the Ancient sample.  Unless he is lying to me, the Ancient used its own abilities to repair the damage done to the N sample.  XVIII would still have been in a susceptible state, so it may be more likely to imprint whatever ability XVIII-A used - most likely a Limit Break.  I will have to test for this at a later date, however, since it is far too early in the experiments to begin adding variations, and the numbers from the test results the next day may be outliers, as this was only the second day of injections and mako insertions, and the beginning always shows the most variation.  However, this is something to keep in mind.  
   
If nothing else, this may help induce bonding between the two, which can only aid in my results. Provided it is done in a controlled way. I will not have controllable variables introduced wildly and ruin my experiments.  Hopefully, the N sample will become docile sooner rather than later, so troopers are no longer necessary.    
   
If it does not, however, measures will have to be taken.  If worse comes to worse, I suppose I could sever it's spinal column or some other such surgical procedure. I don't need it mobile, after all, just viable. And I still have samples on hand from other subjects, including S - if worse comes to worse and these fools taint my data too much, it could at the very least make a useful incubator.  
   
Hojo's notes on subject XVIII, p. 42_  
   
\--  
   
The troopers and the scientist came back.

And whenever they came, Tifa didn't fight, for all she still went into a defense stance before she was hit with the Confuse, and Aerith was grateful enough for that.  
   
\--  
   
_"Do you see now, girl," Zangan says sharply.  "Do you see with your own eyes what they can do?"  
   
"No," Tifa whispers, and falls to her knees at the sight.  She had often imagined Nibelheim as it had been before ShinRa and their SOLDIERs came, but this...this...  "No, this can't be right, how--" she says, shaking her head furiously in her confusion, unable to believe what her eyes are telling her.  
   
It is Nibelheim.  Nibelheim as it had been, before Sephiroth and the other SOLDIERs came.  But...but it's not right; none of the people there are right. She can tell that even from here; her eyes have always been so sharp her father used to say she had dragon eyes, able to spot even a huegelsteiger goat on the side of the mountain from far away.  The people there look so much like people who had died, but they aren't, even though they live in houses identical to what had had been there. It has been less than a year, but already, there is no sign of all the destruction of that terrible night.  "No."  
   
"This is what they do," Zangan says again, but there is no anger in his voice anymore, only sadness. "Nibelheim was never destroyed, no one was killed, and they made your memories a lie.  You are the one no longer in step with the reality they have made. This is their power.  Your home is a lie, Tifa Lockheart, but they will make you a liar and kill you for it to make that true. Do you see now? So chose. Go back there and live a lie, or disappear and have no past. But the path you're trying to create now will only end with you hunted down and erased.  If you want your revenge so badly, stay in the shadows. Wander and strike in the best way you know. But if you attack straight, alone and with rage, screaming about the past they have erased, you will be swatted down. This is the reality that exists now," he said, his voice harsh. "And you must make your peace with this much of it or you will be destroyed."  
   
She looks at what had been her home, and the tears begin - but they are not of sadness. They are of rage, so strong and overwhelming that she is shaking because she has no idea what to do with the rawness of it. _

_Her master covers her eyes with a hand, shielding her from it, and guides her away._

\--

It always took Aerith a while to get her bearings, after.  It was always a bit like waking from a sleep but still being tired - her brain was sluggish as if it was still half-full of dreams. Or rather, it was more like dreaming while awake; like everything was a little too bright, a little too sharp, a little too hyper-real, even though her brain felt like it was two steps behind.

She didn't know how to possibly describe it. She just knew she didn't like it, any of it, and she never got used to it, even though she'd lost count of how often it had happened.

She sat up, then felt dizzy, as if she had moved too fast, and she steadied herself with one hand on the bed.  "Whoa," she said, and shook her head, then looked over at Tifa's bed.

"Tifa? Are you OK? Tifa?" Aerith said, and sighed at her own repetition.

She really should have known the answer by then.

Tifa was _not_ OK.

She always hoped it would be different, but it never was.  Whatever it was they were doing to Tifa - whatever it was they were injecting her with - left her in a strange, disquieting blank state that never stopped being unsettling.

Aerith got up and headed over to Tifa's bed. Tifa was lying there like she'd been dumped when they scientists finished with them. Aerith wondered, for a moment, how the scientists and their troopers brought them back - they always walked the two of them into the tank room, and then everything after going in the tank - after the strange jolt of panic at being in the mako, lungs and mind panicking no matter how many times it happened, no matter how much she knew it was ok, that they could breathe the mako somehow and not drown, her body always panicked, at first, and then it was nothing but dreams, and that feeling of dreaming awake when she returned to reality, still smelling of mako and staring up at a gray ceiling.

The scientists walked them down at gunpoint, but how did they bring them back?

It didn't really matter much.  
   
"Tifa," she said softly, and brushed some of Tifa's hair, stiff with dried mako, out of her eyes.

No response.

She wished she had a hair brush.

She sat down next to Tifa on the bed. "Tifa," she said again, a little louder, and nothing.

But she felt something, a tiny spark of something, something bright and different from the tendril of wrong she could also feel, and it always gave her a tiny hope - she suspected that tiny little spark was Tifa, was Tifa coming back, and she always focused on it, and let her voice and her touch, light against Tifa's hair, or her shoulder, or her back, help guide Tifa back.

"Come on, up you go," she said, and pulled Tifa up sitting next to her. Tifa was limp, pliant, and her head fell onto Aerith's shoulder. Aerith put her arm around Tifa and rested her head on top of Tifa's, feeling for that spark, and taking in the warmth of another person and the comfort it brought.

Something in her relaxed, and she realized, feeling almost sick at herself as she did, that she liked this.  
   
She liked Tifa like this better than the constant wariness when she was awake. Liked for a moment not having Tifa sullen and suspicious in one side of the room. Liked being able to care for someone in some small way.  These moments, where Tifa was blank instead of wary and distrustful, leaning against her like a helpless child would her mother.  The days in between when the scientist would come, Tifa would sometimes say almost nothing at all to her and Aerith always felt too hesitant to even try to break the almost oppressive silence from Tifa after the first few times ended in Tifa abrupt pulling back and going wary, and leaving Aerith feeling more alone and on edge than she could ever remember.  
   
It disturbed her even as she took the small moments of peace; of some kind of safety and contact, and she _hated_ that feeling.

This couldn't go on.

She didn't dare let this go on.  She wouldn't let ShinRa turn her into whatever this would make her.

They would talk. When Tifa woke up, Aerith was putting a stop to this, somehow.

 _And while we're dreaming_ , she thought wryly, then sighed and closed her eyes.

_Later. For now, just...later._

For now, there was this, this moment of quiet without sullenness, without the weight of a distrustful stare.

And the warmth of someone else, and someone to care for, in the only time and only way the other woman would allow herself to be.

She let the time pass quietly, the only sounds that of their breathing, strangely in sync.

Breathing, just breathing, as the world finally settled into normal - as normal as it could be in this place - and went from being too sharp and too slow into normal.

The mako, she knew, did weird things. But she also knew it was the Planet; the very thing that let her able to feel even a little of whatever was happening in Tifa, let her reach for the tiny spark was best she could.

When that feeling of a spark came closer as it also, paradoxically, got harder to sense, she knew it meant Tifa would be waking up soon, something that was a relief as much as part of her that she hated found it a disappointment.

It wasn't just the mako doing funny things to her, she knew.

"Nngh," Tifa let out softly, then took a deep breath.

It was always the same - that faint grunt, then a deep breath. Then this, a moment of confusion before Tifa pulled away.

Always the same, and it always somehow _hurt_ , so when Tifa pulled away from her this time, a little too jerkily when Aerith was feeling so raw, and with something so distrustful and suspicious in her eyes, _still_ , something in Aerith just _snapped_.

\--

Tifa always hated waking up after whatever mad experiment ShinRa was inflicting on her was over.

She hated the way her head felt, she hated how things felt wrong, and she hated feeling weak. It always took her a while to get her bearings. But she always woke up the same - feeling somehow safe, with Aerith nearby, either sitting on the floor by Tifa's bed, and next to her with either her head on Aerith's lap or with Aerith's arm on her shoulder.

Always waiting for her to wake up, like she was seeing how long it would take, and it was always like this, always - Aerith was always awake before her, and it also seemed so odd that she focused on that and stomped down on any feelings of safety and warmth. It was always every single time, which was not safe, more like it was one more scientist observing her, and--

The thought hit her uncomfortably, but it would make so much sense, and--

\--and Aerith was yelling.

Tifa'd never seen her do that, never seen her angry (something that was also far too suspicious for her tastes, but now, all of a sudden, and directed at her, made her eyes go wide with surprise.  
   
"Now look!" Aerith said sharply. "In case you missed it, I'm smelling pretty mako tank fresh myself! They're dumping me in there, same as you!" she yelled.  "So quit acting like I'm some ShinRa spy or something!  They're doing this to both of us!  I don't know why you won't trust anyone, but it's time you started trusting me, because I can't take this any more!" she yelled, and was on her feet, pacing angrily in the small room.  
   
 Tifa startled. "What? I--"  
   
"Stop it!" Aerith yelled, and something in her voice quavered.  She gestured around the cell, then at her hand, at the black XVIII-A tattooed on it.  "I'm just like you right now! I'm just as trapped and just as scared, and I can't take any of this anymore!" Aerith yelled, then wiped angrily at her eyes. "I just can't!"  
   
If Aerith was acting, she was a good actress. She was shaking, and she balled her hands into fists as she bit her lip, as if trying to stop more words from coming out.

Tifa desperately wanted to be able to trust Aerith, to trust someone. But she'd learned, the hard way, that trusting usually just got you slapped in the face.  
   
But she didn't want to be in this alone, whatever it was this was. And she was tired, so tired, of being on edge all the time.  
   
She wrapped her arms around herself tightly, feeling tired and weak - like she should be stronger than this, like she shouldn't be fine staying on guard all the time, shouldn't feel this need she kept stomping on to depend on someone so much. And she hated all of it; hated the feeling and hated having the feeling.  
   
She hated what ShinRa was doing to her...and she realized she hated what they were doing to, and not just because of the experiments.  
   
Maybe Aerith was a spy. Maybe ShinRa was willing to go that deep to get information out of one piddling little terrorist.  
   
Or maybe Aerith had been telling the truth all along, that she was a much a prisoner as Tifa was, and Tifa had been making both of them even more miserable.  
   
She looked up, at Aerith's face, and into her eyes, and they had the same gleam as the SOLDIERs had.

The same gleam her own had, when she looked away and over at the mirror above the sink and saw her own reflection.

Green eyes gleaming like Sephiroth's; brown eyes gleaming like mako pools.

"I don't trust you," Tifa said, her voice small. She looked at her hand, at the black XVIII, and at the XVIII-A on Aerith's, and shut her eyes. "Because I've seen ShinRa wipe out an entire town and then refill it with actors taking dead people's places.  That's what they did to my home," she said, biting her lip and still not opening her eyes.  "But...I'm not that important, am I? All this. Not even that's big enough for ShinRa to do all this," she said, letting her shoulders drop.  
   
"I don't trust you," she said again, before she looked Aerith in the eyes again. "But I'll try."  
   
\--  
   
Time passed slowly, in the cells.  There was little for them to do, besides talk to each other, and wait for the next time the scientists and the troopers came.  Tifa still stayed tight-lipped about a lot of her past, and Aerith didn't press it because she had seen those scars, but did her best to fill the silence with stories about when she was little, all the while careful to stay away from anything related to ShinRa.  Most of the time, though, it was so quiet Aerith wanted to scream.  She hated being cooped up as much as they were, and so far away from life.  
   
She couldn't hear the Planet here, and that silence made the other silence so much worse.  
   
Tifa didn't seem to mind how quiet it was, somehow, and kept herself busy by training.  
   
Aerith had to admit, Tifa had a grace about her when she went through her katas - she did them, now; she'd hesitantly asked Aerith if she could move the beds around so she could practice, and Aerith had been so grateful for that small change she'd agreed. They would move the beds into a corner when she wanted to train and back when she was done, and Aerith would watch her as Tifa, eyes shut, went through her forms.

Tifa'd had training, a good bit of it, and with nothing else to do but exercise most of the time, she'd somehow gotten more muscular than she had been when they arrived.  Aerith marveled at Tifa's dedication, and figured it a good thing - if they were ever going to get out, she figured she'd have to do the one charming their way out of the cell, somehow, but it'd be Tifa being in top fighting shape that would give their best shot at getting out of the building.  
   
A little voice sometimes suggested she ought to at least try a push-up or two, then she'd look at her pathetically thin little arms and then Tifa's, and give up before she even started, figuring she didn't need the humiliation on top of everything else. Plus, she didn't want to push it; do anything to upset the fragile trust Tifa seemed to be struggling to give her.  
   
But there was something different about today. Tifa opened her eyes and looked over at Aerith as she was going from a punch to a block.  "So," she said, staying in position with one arm up in a block, "You want to just sit there, or you want me to teach you this?"  
   
Aerith's eyes widened slightly in shock.  Tifa had never spoken to her when she was working out; only pretended Aerith wasn't there - or rather, tuned her out the way they had both learned to do to have any semblance of privacy.  
   
"You...you don't mind?" Aerith said hesitantly.  
   
"No," Tifa said, shaking her head.  She went out of the stance, and gestured for Aerith to come over.  
   
Aerith was glad that day she was wearing the scrub-like clothes they had been given instead of her dress.  They only had three outfits each, the clothes they'd been wearing when they came, and two coarse, ill-fitting sets of scrub pants and short, side-tying hospital gown-like shirts.  Those two outfits were taken away once a week for laundering and they were given clean ones, but they still kept their clothes from before, as if a reminder there was a world outside of the labs.  
   
Plus, it gave them more to wear, so they could wash their dirty clothes in the sink and let them air dry draped over the beds.  
   
"Stand like this," Tifa said.  "This is the basic stance, and all of your power and stability will come from it."  
   
"Like this?" Aerith said, and Tifa shook her head.    
   
"Close.  Hunker down a bit more, but keep your back straight and stick your butt out."  
   
Aerith blinked, not at all sure how that was supposed to work.  "Okay..." she said, but gamely tried.  
   
"Good!" Tifa said, nodding.  "Now put your arms up like this."  
   
\--  
   
Once they got through the basic stance, Tifa told Aerith to make a fist.  
   
She took one look at the fist Aerith made and raised an eyebrow.  "You've never fought before, have you?"  
   
Aerith raised her jaw slightly.  "I have!  I _did_ grow up in the slums. I've had to fight a couple times!"  
   
Tifa smiled, just a little bit. "OK, a different question. You aren't very _good_ at fighting, are you?"  
   
Aerith laughed in spite of herself. "I...no. I was much better at talking my way out of it or running away," she said self-deprecatingly. "And usually I had something on hand if it came down to it. I'm much better with a staff than hand to hand.  After all, you could find a good length of pipe anywhere, and if you did, all you have to do is just whack someone over the head with that and take off."  
   
"I always liked getting right up in here," Tifa said. "Show 'em not to underestimate me. Here, make your fist like this, see?  The way you're doing it, you could break your thumb."  
   
"Well, that would be counter-productive," Aerith said with a laugh, and mimicked how Tifa had made a fist.  

"Punch so you hit with the first two knuckles.  Like this," she said, and threw a single, straight punch.  
   
Aerith tried it.  Her form was completely wrong and that punch wouldn't have so much as bruised a fly, but it wasn't that bad for what was very clearly a first attempt.  "Not bad.  But you're too exposed; turn yourself more sideways so you're a smaller target," she added, putting her hands on Aerith's shoulders to position her better. "Right, like that.  Now try again.  And remember, aim with your first two knuckles, and draw your arm back as you twist, so it's got your weight behind it."  
   
\--  
   
"OK, I'm done, mercy," Aerith panted. She wiped sweat out of her eyes with her arm and winced slightly. "I think my arms are about to fall off."  
   
"Wimp," Tifa said, but she said it with a grin.  
   
"Yes. I am," Aerith said, laughing herself.  "I am a stinky, smelly, weak wimp whose arms are about to fall off. I'm so glad we're both on the same page with that."  
   
Tifa laughed.  "Get some water. You probably need it."  
   
Aerith nodded, still breathing hard.  Tendrils of her bangs were plastered against the side of her face from sweat, and she looked like she was wilting.  
   
"Wait, like this, first," Tifa said, and went into the stance she had first taught Aerith, the base stance. Aerith whimpered, but copied Tifa's stance.  Tifa crossed her arms in front of her chest, then brought them back to her sides sharply.  Aerith mimicked it.  
   
"Now bow to me," Tifa said, and bowed slightly to Aerith.  Aerith copied her again, and Tifa went out of the fighting stance.  "OK, _now_ you can go get some water, wimp."  
   
"Water!" Aerith croaked and rushed over to the sink and turned the faucet on, then drank three cups of water one after the other, as fast as she could fill her cup.  
   
Aerith started splashing water on her face, and Tifa turned away when the other woman started to take off her loose, hospital gown-like shirt.  There was very little privacy, but they gave each other what they could and just got used to the rest.  
   
Aerith bathed as best she could in the small sink, then washed her shirt and bra, and Tifa thought.    
   
In an odd way, even though it had been on a whim, it was deciding to teach Aerith something of fighting that convinced her that Aerith _didn't_ actually know how to fight.  You could hide a lot of things, she knew, and lie about a lot, but your body never lied.  That much she knew - you couldn't hide training.  If someone had trained, seriously _trained_ , how they moved and positioned themselves gave it away as clear as day.  
   
You couldn't pretend not to know what you were doing when something had become a reflex, and Aerith just didn't have those reflexes. Not only that, but if you learned one way of fighting, it tended to bleed over when you started a new one - fighting stances, the way you made a fist, footwork, all of it.  
   
But Aerith didn't have any of that bleedover.  None of that muscle memory. And while there was a chance they could have sent someone completely untrained in any kind of fighting style in as a spy...it wasn't likely, not when they knew Tifa could fight as well as she could. It wouldn't have made any sense for a ShinRa spy - a Turk - at all.  
   
But it would make sense for a flower seller who happened to be a half-Ancient snatched up off the streets.  
   
"I'm going to be very sore tomorrow, aren't I?" Aerith said, sounding slightly mournful.  
   
Tifa looked over on instinct.  "Probably," she said, and Aerith groaned.  
   
"Oh, well.  I needed the exercise anyway. I used to walk around so much," Aerith said as she dried off with a small hand towel.  "I do wish they'd let us out to shower more than once a week. My hair could do with a washing now," she said, but gave Tifa a lopsided smile.  
   
"I just want a real bath," Tifa said, giving in just a little.  She tried not to talk about things that were out of reach, but it was so hard sometimes.  
   
Aerith let out a longing sigh.  "Oh...a bath.  A nice, long bath.  Hopefully with a lot of hot water."  
   
"And bubbles," Tifa said.  "And soap that didn't seem like they got it from some industrial bargain bin."  
   
"Like that shampoo they give us," Aerith said, making a face as she put on her spare shirt.  
   
Tifa made a face. "I had better shampoo when I was out living in the woods for a year and making it out of lichens," she groaned.  "I swear, when we get out of here, I am heading for the first hot spring I can find. First one. And not getting out until I'm all wrinkly."  
   
"You can make soap out of lichens?" Aerith said, sounding surprised. "And you know, I've never been to a hot spring." She spread out her wet shirt and bra to dry over the edge of her bed.  "I've been to the public baths in the Little Nankyo part of town, but never to a real hot spring."  
   
"They're so wonderful," Tifa said, sighing.  "There's this one I went to, there's some kind of mineral in the water, and it just makes your skin so smooth afterwards." She sighed again, just remembering it.  
   
"You'll have to take me to one when we get out of here," Aerith said, and Tifa realized she kind of wanted to, and she wasn't quite sure where that came from.  
   
"Deal," Tifa said, and Aerith gave her a bright smile she couldn't help but return. 

Then they both fell silent as Tifa untied her shirt and went over to wash.  
   
Aerith hummed to herself, toying with her nails and offering that bit of privacy as Tifa bathed, and Tifa thought it didn't really matter if she wanted to go with Aerith to a hot spring one day or not.   
   
It was nice to dream, to dream of being free and to dream that they were simply normal girls, friends from who knows where, if only for a little while.  
   
\--  
   
Things fell into a pattern.  Every few days, the troopers and scientists would come, and throw a Confuse on Tifa, then inject her with whatever it was they did.  Then they would take them away, into an area with mako tanks, and force them into one, and time would stop.  
   
When were put back in their cell, Aerith would usually be all right, after a bit, but Tifa...Tifa would always have that same, glassy stare, with her pupils wide and blown out like she was still Confused, and the faint, wispy tendril of _wrong_ still snaking through her before it faded.  While she waited for it to fade, Aerith would often sit by Tifa's bed and talk to her, or sit cradling Tifa, so she at least felt like she was at least doing something. It always seemed to help, somehow.  
   
Then a day after they were returned to their cell, and the next, the scientists and troopers would come again, and take their blood. And then nothing, until the cycle started again.  
   
Tifa had gotten good, most of the time, about not fighting the troopers.  But not every time. And not this time, not when it was the one trooper who tended to manhandle her the most.  
   
Aerith was pretty sure Tifa's shoulder dislocated when she tried to throw off the trooper as he was strapping her down into her bed, just before the scientist cursed and hit her with a Confuse, then jammed a needle in her arm that made Tifa go limp.  
   
\--  
   
_"Where were you born?" she asks as they hike.  She still tires easily and feels occasional twinges of pain from the time her teacher will not allow her to talk about, and she needs a distraction.  And it has become a challenge for her now, to drag from him where he is from, to make him admit that he is from a place that had been--because if he does, then it means she can remember Nibelheim, that she has the right to remember.  
   
"The place where my mother was."  
   
"And where was that?"  
   
"The place where she bore me," her master answers with a smile though he has no mouth, and will say no more._  
   
\--  
   
There was something different this time.  Aerith didn't know what it was, but she could tell - that little tendril of _wrong_ inside Tifa after the tanks suddenly gotten a lot more...she wasn't sure.  She wasn't sure how to put it into words. Something that was _wrong_ had suddenly gotten a lot _wronger_.

It was as if...it was as if that tendril of _wrong_ she'd always felt snaking around the periphery had suddenly found that tiny spark that was always there hiding, and was trying to grow over it, like ivy choking a plant beneath it.

It scared her in a way she couldn't begin to put into words.

But there was nothing she could do.  Nothing beyond what she did now, sit cradling Tifa as she stared out at nothing, trying to coax that spark to burn brighter, trying to bring Tifa back, and waiting.  
   
The silence and the _wrongness_ was crushing her.  So she stroked Tifa's hair, and began to talk.  
   
\--

_Things are progressing smoothly with the samples, but I find myself running into outside problems, namely the idiots on my staff.  XVIII has again been damaged prior to today's tests. While I do plan introduce injuring them to push XVIII-A to limit breaks to see if it will continue to try to heal XVIII and if that will aid with the imprinting of abilities after genetic splicing has begun, these must be controlled and done in such a way as to intentionally deepen the bond between them.  
   
I especially do not want an unforeseen variables to continue to be added in to the testing, since I have begun reinforcing some of the bonding that seems to be happening by introducing Jenova samples into this round of genetic manipulation, first with the sample from N. I will begin introducing Jenova DNA into the Ancient sample once I have finished the comparisons between the parent sample and its own, to finish weeding out the genetic impurities from Gast.  This is a delicate task, but the Ancient sample is only half Ancient, so introducing pure genes into both should produce interesting effects, and possibly boost the ability of sample A to bond with XVIII, and vice versa.  However, this will inadvertently mean the two of them will undergo the SOLDIER creation process, which can either be a plus (potentially testing the outcome of samples incubated and born from a SOLDIER mother) or a minus (reduce both of them to sniveling husks, or give them the strength to escape).  
   
I have ordered their holding areas to be reinforced to withstand SOLDIER-level strength, and today's mishap finally pushed me into requested the doctor working with the SOLDIERs in Junon I was looking at be transferred here to assist me to replace the idiot I'm firing once I jump through these ridiculous hoops and the transfer request goes through. _

_I am requesting Dr. L for three reasons: a) she is female, so I suspect she will have a gentler touch with my samples, b) her files note that she is good with handling the more difficult SOLDIERs, i.e., the ones who have ended up unsatisfactory for various reasons and have been sent to the facilities in Junon, so she should be able to control both the troopers AND the samples, and c) being military-trained, all of her reports on the SOLDIERs she has treated are meticulously detailed and she seems to have an eye for noticing small changes, which could be invaluable at this stage.  Once everything is in place in a month or so, I should have adequate baseline data and will be ready to proceed.  
   
Pity she's a bit past her prime, though. Would have been nice to have a pretty young thing about again.  
   
Hojo's notes on XVIII, pg. 169_  
   
\--

"When I was a little girl," Aerith said softly, "my mother bought me this big set of crayons.  It had all these colors. I just loved it," she began.  She didn't know if Tifa could really hear her or not, but that didn't seem to be important.  She couldn't just sit there, in that preternatural and eerie stillness.  She needed to say something, needed to interact with Tifa in some kind of way.  "One day, I decided the paper I was coloring on just wasn't big enough, and I'd make the whole wall pretty," she said with a faint smile at the memory.  "So I drew flowers all over the walls.  And when my mother got home...oh, she was so mad at me!" Aerith laughed at that, and rested her head against the top of Tifa's for a moment.  "She told me if I wanted flowers around, I had better go grow them myself, not draw them on the wall!  And then she brought out a bucket of soapy water and a rag and made me scrub the whole thing down.  It took me forever!  Then she took my crayons away for two days!  I was so mad!  
   
"But you know," she said with a faint sigh, "There was one place that just never got clean.  No matter how hard I scrubbed, there was one flower that never quite came clean.  Even now, there are still traces of it on the wall and Mom just shakes her head at it and tells me what a silly child I was.  
   
"When we get out of here," Aerith said, "I'll show it to you. Maybe you know a way to get that crayon off the wall," she said.  
   
She fell silent, but hugged Tifa tightly.  "I promise you'll get to see it one day.  That and the flowers I grew instead of drawing on the walls," she finished, and hoped someday that it would be true.  "We'll escape from this place, and find the Promised Land my mother told me about."  
   
She would get them out.  Somehow, she would get them out.

She'd do what her mother had told her, so long ago, and she'd get them out.  
   
\--  
   
_What's at the core of my existence isn't 'nothingness.' It’s not that desolate, arid place.  
  -Haruki Murakami, 1Q84 Book 2_


	4. What Is Inside

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ahaha, I exist. It's been a rough few years, and I fell out of ficcing because I didn't really have time or the energy because first my job was sucking my soul away, then I changed jobs and had a two-hour commute each way, which killed my free time. But then I listened to Hamilton, and decided it was time to "write like I’m running out of time." That's how y'all got the end of TTYNKAP in one big burst, and why you're hopefully about to get the end of Thagirion as well. 
> 
> This is for illumynare, who won my help_japan auction. 
> 
> For the sake of brevity, I'm cutting out the extensive author's notes I actually wrote for this--if you are interested, I'll be posting them separately, as an Ultimata, the same as I did for The Things You Never Knew About People.

Part III:  
中心にあるのは  
What Is Inside  
 

  私という存在の核心にあるのは無ではない。荒れ果てた潤いのない場所でもない。私という存在の中心にあるのは愛だ。   
-村上春樹、1Q84 Book 2  

\--  
   
_Two years ago_  
   
\--  
 

_"Do you see now, girl," her master say sharply. "Do you see with your own eyes what they can do?"_

_"No," Tifa whispers, and falls to her knees at the sight. "No, this can't be right, how--" she says, shaking her head furiously in her confusion, unable to believe what her eyes are telling her._

_It is Nibelheim. Nibelheim as it had been, before Sephiroth and the other SOLDIERs came. But...but it's not right; none of the people there are right. She can tell that even from here; her eyes have always been so sharp her father used to say she had dragon eyes, able to spot even a hillclimber goat on the side of the mountain from far away. The people there look so much like people who had died, but they aren't, even though they live in houses identical to what had had been there. It has been less than a year, but already, there is no sign of all the destruction of that terrible night. "No."_

_"This is what they do, girl," her master says again, but there is no anger in his voice anymore, only sadness. "Nibelheim was never destroyed, no one was killed, and they made your memories a lie. You are the one no longer in step with the reality they have made. This is their power. Your home is a lie, Tifa Lockheart, but they will make you a liar and kill you for it to make that true. Do you see now? So chose. Go back there and live a lie, or disappear and have no past. But the path you're trying to create now will only end with you hunted down and erased. If you want your revenge so badly, stay in the shadows. Wander and strike. And have no past. Because only this is the reality that exists now."_

_She looks at what had been her home, and the tears begin. Her master comes over, and covers her eyes with a hand, shielding her from it, and guides her away._

\--

There was a smart rap at his door, and Hojo looked up from his notes in annoyance, then saw the clock.

"Come in," he said, not bothering to stand until he knew he'd have to for convention's sake.

It was ten o'clock on the nose, exactly when his new assistant was to present herself. The door slid open, and his new arrival walked through.

When the door slid to a close behind her, he stood.

"Ahh, Dr. Laumbe," Hojo said, smiling in the bland way he had to for these tedious social interactions. "Please, have a seat," he said, gesturing to the seat he had placed in front of his desk for this.

"Thank you. And a pleasure to finally meet you again," Dr. Laumbe said, giving him a faint bow he hadn't seen since his time in Nibelheim, one likely long-ingrained in her and that she hadn't dropped even years out of the Narsland area--you could always tell who was from there by that Wutai-esque bow they had retained.

Her eyes gave it away, too - dark brown, almost black, and that familiar shape.

They'd met, once, not long after she was assigned to Junon after the war ended. Prior to the end of the war, she'd been a military doctor, one of the few women in ShinRa's military and one of the even fewer female doctors.

She had the same stiff, military way of standing that rubbed Hojo the wrong way - everything about her was no-nonsense and nothing like the young women who normally worked around ShinRa, all carefully sniffing for a husband. And at 35 and unmarried, it was no wonder she seemed to have thrown herself into her work; it was quite clear she'd have little choice. Her clothing was functional, she wore no make up and only small studs in her ears and a plain bracelet with a small round gem on it on her left wrist, and she made no attempt to hide the beginning of grey barely visible in the dark blonde - which was an unusual color for northerners and had doubtless caused her trouble in her life - at her temples.

Really, he preferred the interchangeable, fresh-faced young girls with their make-up and perfume and heels, and legs that would wrap so tightly against him. They used him to get up the ladder, he used them for a fuck, and everything was simple that way because he usually had no other use for them and he knew how to handle them.

Still, she wasn't there to give him something to look at, but to manage his samples, and everything in her files indicated Laumbe would be more than capable in that respect. And despite the military background, she had a brain for science and medicine, in theory.

Hopefully.

And also hopefully, the moronic troopers and guards would respect a "kindred spirit." At the very least, they would have to respect her rank.

She sat down, retaining that same stiff, military posture, but she at the least tempered it with a smile; at least that one thing seeming feminine about her manner.

Really, it _was_ too bad ShinRa seemed to have almost utterly run out of pretty young female scientists. He was going to have to speak to someone about their hiring.

"So. You come quite highly recommended. There are very few people that have such excellent results with the SOLDIERs in Junon."

Her smile seemed to tighten slightly. "I suppose it helps that I've seen combat as well. I was a front line medic for several years, before finishing my medical degree. I've seen what they've seen. It helps."

Hojo fought the urge to roll his eyes. "Yes, yes. Seen the ‘horrors of war' that breaks some of the weaker ones who should have been washed out of the selection process. We've refined the process to admit fewer of them, but some still slip through the cracks from time to time," he said. "Your work with the more mentally damaged SOLDIERs has actually been a great help to the project."

Laumbe was still holding onto her smile, but it seemed strained. "Yes. Well. Thank you. Helping them is why I focused on psychiatry after the war."

"That is part of why I'm bringing you on for this…special project. It involves a new, experimental form of the SOLDIER process, and I'd like to have you on monitoring it."

The woman seemed to perk up slightly at that. "Oh?"

"As you know, the SOLDIER program has only used male subjects to date. However, I would like to see what might happen if we tailored to process to women."

"You're putting women into the program now?" Laumbe said in surprise.

Hojo gave her a smile. "In a manner of speaking. They are...prototypes, in a way. A test of a theory, if you will. And with both your background and gender, you seemed a good fit for aiding in Project O."

Laumbe smiled brightly, and showed the first flash of enthusiasm he had seen in her for anything other than getting out of Junon. "Well, count me in for this project, then," she said. "I welcome any chance to allow more women into ShinRa's military. And despite some...difficulties, I've enjoyed working with the SOLDIERs so far, so I look forward to whatever I can do to help aid the new program," she said, and Hojo pushed up his glasses to hide another smile.

"Excellent. Currently, the two sa--test subjects being used are both rare cases. One in particular is from an area with a high natural level of mako exposure, so we're expecting to learn a great deal from her no matter what the outcome of the main experiment. Discovering her was, in fact, the impetus for this."

"Oh?" Laumbe said, looking as through she were trying to decide how to process all of that.

"Natural exposure since being _in utero_ seems to cause extra sensitivity to mako. Which leads to the hope that she will 'take' faster and more fully to the SOLDIER process. I'll be comparing her overall process to a male control from the same area in another facility. You will, however, simply be monitoring the two test subjects here and making sure things run smoothly, should you choose to accept your promotion, of course."

"I see no reason why I wouldn't so far," she replied back.

"Excellent. Oh, and, Dr. Laumbe," Hojo said suddenly.

"Yes?"

"You're from Narsland, correct?"

She frowned slightly, as if in confusion. "Yes, that's right."

"Urtharbrun, was it? That's on the other side of the valley from Nibelheim. I was stationed out there for a bit. Tell me, have you ever heard of the _Ohnegesichterin_?"

She blinked. " _Ohnegesichterin_? The hungry ghosts in the mountains?" she said, sounding surprised. "Well, yes, I've heard of them. You'd probably be hard-pressed to find anyone from the north who hasn't."

"Do you think they're real?"

She let out an equally surprised-sounding laugh. "There are a lot of things out in the mountains in the Narsland region, but no one has ever actually come across an _Ohnegesichterin_. If there were real, you would have thought someone would have long ago caught one. They're just fairy tales." She gave him a puzzled smile, but her brow was wrinkled. "Why do you ask? I didn't think anyone outside Narsland even knew about them. They don't even have a name in Standard!"

"No reason," Hojo said. "I only learned on them when I was in the north, and have been doing a bit of cross-cultural study since," he smiled in the way he knew to be disarming to young women, and was pleased to see it worked to some extent on Laumbe. Good. "Come with me, and I'll show you what I'm working on now."

He stood up, and she followed suit. "This way, doctor," he said, gesturing, then stopped. "Is that a bracer?" he asked, staring at the bracelet she wore that he only just now noticed wasn't just decorative.

"Yes," she said, her voice sounding distinctly no-nonsense.

"You'll have to remove it."

"No."

"Excuse me?" Hojo said, completely affronted.

"It only has a Sleep. It is purely defensive and nothing to be concerned of."

"That doesn't matter. It is materia that has not been authorized for this project."

Dr. Laumbe gave him a steely look. "I don't care," she said flatly. "I keep a Sleep materia equipped at _all_ times. Especially if I am dealing with SOLDIERs."

Hojo gave her a strange look.

"They are bigger, stronger, and faster than I am," she said, her voice flat. "And some of them in Junon were a bit...twitchy. Especially after the war. You know what being assigned out to Junon means," she said pointedly. He thought that was a bit rich, since she likely had no idea WHY Junon had been designated the hole they sent the SOLDIERs having breakdowns to - after Genesis, Angeal, AND Sephiroth failed spectacularly, ShinRa had decided to try to cut off at least some of the risk of losing their investment, and set up the psych facilities at Junon. The war had had nothing to do with it, but he saw no reason to disavow her--yet--of her beliefs. "Having a Sleep has probably saved more than one SOLDIER from a court-martial and me from getting my neck snapped by someone having a flashback when I'm trying to administer tests."

Hojo gave her a patronizing smile. "That may be so, but you won't need it--"

"Fine, _I_ get twitchy without it," she said, overriding him, and he felt a sting of irritation. "Like I said. It has saved my life more than once. I will not unequip it."

Hojo found himself wondering if this woman was going to be more trouble than she might be worth.

"It is, as I stated, purely defensive, Professor. You needn't worry about me casting Sleep willy-nilly. Unless my life is in danger, it's just a pretty little gem on my bracelet. I've written up reports for every time I've had to subdue someone with a Sleep. It's a last resort."

As much as Hojo hated to admit it, the woman had a point, and it was a far better route for restraining samples when they grew...unruly...than the current one, for all that had offered new insights. And if worse came to worse, it wasn't as if the small amount of mako used for a Sleep would cause the data to be skewed TOO much.

"Very well," Hojo said magnanimously. "Keep it, but use it only when absolutely necessary. I won't risk my results being skewed any more than they have to be."

She frowned slightly. "I'm not sure how a Sleep could possibly skew your results, sir, but it is and always will be a _last resort_. I prefer to use my words."

"Good. Now, before we were interrupted," he said, and ushered her through the door.

\--

 _They trade off who prepares meals. Her master is used to cooking for himself, and it always surprises Tifa a little for a man to cook his own food--it just wasn't_ like that _in Nibelheim._

_Tifa had long been the one cooking at home - she had taken over cooking after her mother died - so she is used to it._

_She doesn't really know when she starts doing it. Maybe because it is a nice day--early spring, not too warm and not too cold--there are no monsters about, and the trees are just beginning to bloom a beautiful pale lavender almost the same color as the_ Bergtränen _near home that will be blooming soon. But she starts humming as she cooks, and then that turns into her singing quietly._

_It is a song her mother used to sing, one that is a well-known and traditional song around the Mt. Nibel area. It is an old song, and so, like most old songs, in dialect._

'Wait, my lass,' the young lad said,  
I'll cross o'er the mountains  
And far to the sea,

And there I'll make my name  
And when I a famed man be,  
You will be my bride'

His lass, she bade him on his way,  
And then to him she said,  
"Where you go, there will I be

If you go to the mountains,  
Then I'll be your path  
And guide you your way home

If you go far 'cross the sea,  
Then I'll be the star  
That lights you back to me

_"Standard," her master says sharply, though his face had no mouth to speak._

_Something in her snaps; breaks. She is tired; it has been a long day of traveling and training, and this small thing is all she has now to connect her to her mother. She knows to only use Standard when they are near people, and until that instant, when she speaks to him, but this--this is her own time, to herself, and she is suddenly angry beyond belief he would try to dictate how she speaks - how she sings - to herself._ "Ich will nicht!" _Tifa yells angrily in Narslandische._ "Ich will nicht vergessen! Ich werde nicht vergessen!"

 _The open-handed slap her master gives her across her mouth is the first and only time he had ever struck her. Yes, she has been hit by him many times when she was training, but this is_ different _; this is something devastating in a way that none of the bruises she's ever gotten from being taught to fight have ever been, and the taste of blood in her mouth now is unlike all of the other times she has tasted it._

_"You speak using words that have vanished from the world," he says sharply. "Never speak them again, unless you wish to vanish as well. They will be your downfall, and I will not let them be mine as well."_

_Her master walks away from her angrily, and that day is the last that Tifa has a dialect to speak._

—

Anneke stopped short when they entered the experiment facility.

At first, it was the sheer scale of it that caught her by surprise. This was nothing like the medical facilities at Junon. Junon had been a training facility, true, even though it now had its own reputation because of the SOLDIERs who were sent there _after_ their initial training there, but there was nothing like what was housed in the ShinRa facility in Midgar.

But what made her breath catch was when she caught sight of the two test subjects.

"Professor--," she began, then stopped because she really had no idea how to even proceed.

Hojo gave her a faint smile. "Yes?" he asked, as if two half-naked women floating together in a tank of mako were _normal_ , and she really had no idea how to process _that_.

She took a deep breath, then spoke very carefully. "Why are they in one tank?"

Hojo's smile actually brightened, which was not the reaction she had been expecting in the slightest, and it made her feel slightly more unsteady even as it made her hope there was a rational explanation for this.

"What do you know about the SOLDIER process, doctor?"

She blinked, feeling like she had been doing a lot of it that day. "Only the most basic information about the outline of the process, sir. And what I've been told by SOLDIERs at Junon. But they said very little, and what they said, I can not repeat because of doctor-patient confidentiality," she said flatly.

"Tell me what you can, then," Hojo said, sounding bored.

"That they were given injections and then underwent mako immersion."

"Ahh, yes, the very basics, then," he said. "The injections are a special compound that changes their very DNA," Hojo said, his faint smile returning. "Their genes are infused with those of an Ancient."

Anneke felt her eyes widen, and she stared at him. "But...but they're--"

"A myth?" Hojo asked with a slightly mocking smile. "If they are a myth then, behold, a mythical creature. Or half of one," he said, and pointed to one of the young women in the tank, the one with long reddish-brown hair. "Her mother was the last full-blooded Ancient on this planet. And the DNA used in the SOLDIER process is from the DNA of a preserved Ancient found where that one," he said, now pointing at the other woman, "was born and raised."

Anneke felt as if her breath had been knocked out of her. "Amazing," she breathed.

"And they are in the same tank because it is hoped that proximity will help with the process. A kind of imprinting, if you will. Both of them, starting with treatments soon after this one, will be treated with the cells from the original Ancient sample, since this one is only half an Ancient, and it's hoped it will strengthen her own abilities. If this works," Hojo said, "it will yield amazing new potential for the program. And science, of course," he ended. "Even if we learn nothing that will aid the SOLDIER program, it will not be a complete setback, because it will teach us more about how mako is absorbed and processed by the body, which will still know too little about. It is, in a way, carefully controlled mako-poisoning that helps create SOLDIERs, even though we know very little about how it actually _works_."

"Of course," Anneke repeated, still feeling a bit overwhelmed by everything she had just been told. She'd often wondered about the process that had created SOLDIERs, who had both shone on the battlefield and come to her broken by the war, but it was a closely guarded ShinRa secret, and she'd never thought she'd ever really find out, let alone the depths to which it ran. She'd often wondered if it was war or the mako that had broken so many of those men, and here was a chance to get into the thick of the studies of it and see what happened as it was happening, not fuzzy secondhand accounts from boys who barely knew any science beyond what they'd poorly absorbed in school.

"Still interested?" Hojo asked slyly, and Anneke, her eyes still on the two women in the tank, nodded. "Good. Once you've signed your transfer papers...that's when you'll really start to find out just what kind of work is happening here."

The professor turned and walked out of the lab, clearly expecting to be followed. Anneke headed after him, then paused and looked back at the girls again over her shoulder. The rush of excitement was almost enough to extinguish the slight unease leftover from first entering the room. Almost. Close enough to be getting on with. She was a scientist and this promised all kinds of new potential. It wasn't like she hadn't been involved in any of ShinRa's bizarre work before, and this was a step up from her, being transferred from her work monitoring the SOLDIERs in Junon to here assisting Hojo. And all the possibilities--

The girls were clinging to each other in the tank, and Anneke hurried out the door after Hojo.

\--

Tifa woke slower and slower with every time in the mako.

Aerith had no way to properly time it, of course - there were no clocks in their sterile cell - but she could feel it, the same as she could feel how the _wrongness_ seemed to be deepening and taking root in the other woman somehow. It frightened her, almost irrationally, the longer it took Tifa to wake, but she had no idea what she could do to halt it.

She could only wait, and hope Tifa would talk to her. Would talk at all, rather than stare blankly at a wall until she fully came back to herself.

The silence this time stretched on and on, and finally the silence became too heavy to let continue.

"Tifa? Tifa, answer me. Are you all right? Wake up! Tifa! Please?"

The silence dragged on, but then Tifa stirred, just slightly, on her bed.

Aerith was up before she knew it, on her feet and heading to Tifa's side. She sat down on the bed next to Tifa, who was lying on her back, and put her hand on Tifa's shoulder, shaking her slightly to try and wake her up further.

She didn't how long it took for Tifa to finally - _finally_ \- open her eyes. But when she did, her eyes were glassy, unseeing, and Aerith scrambled up onto the narrow bed and curled up on her side next to Tifa. Aerith rested her cheek on her hands and waited, watching Tifa slowly come back to herself.

It took so long. It took far too long. And the tendril of _wrong_ she had felt seemed to have thickened; turned into ivy vines that would cause--were causing--what was underneath to crumble unseen if not ripped away soon.

But she didn't know _how_.

"Ae-Aerith?" Tifa finally said in a small, uncertain voice, turning her head to look at Aerith.

"I'm here. And so are you now. Welcome back," Aerith said and tried to smile. She knew it didn't work very well, but it was all she had. "Are you all right?"

Tifa's opened her mouth, and then her face fell, crumpling into something scared and pained. The sudden fear on her face made something lock up inside Aerith. Tifa always seemed so strong, aside from the terrifying blank times, and Aerith felt the same overwhelming protectiveness wash over her that she felt when they were out of the tanks and Tifa was still unresponsive.

The same protectiveness, and the same sense of helplessness, and without thinking, she wrapped her too-weak arms around the other woman. Tifa tensed for a moment before she turned on her side to face Aerith, the two of them unconsciously mimicking their positions in the tank. Tifa took a deep, shuddering breath, closing her eyes as she suddenly pressed her forehead against Aerith's, and Aerith tightened her arms around her.

Aerith could feel Tifa's faint trembling, and raised her hand to tuck Tifa's head under her chin, and held her like she would a scared child.

They sat like that for several minutes before Tifa spoke, her voice thick and high-pitched with fear.

"Something is...it's _wrong_ , but...but I don't know what. I feel...hollowed out," Tifa said, and her hair was soft under Aerith's chin. Aerith said nothing, only twined one hand in Tifa's hair and waited Tifa to speak. Tifa's words came slowly, as if she were struggling with them. Even back when Tifa had been wary and reticent, she'd never had such a hard time putting her words together. "It's like...like...as if every time they, they stick me with, with needles then in that, put me in that, that tank, parts of me are just getting, getting scooped out like ice cream. And like all that will be left is an empty box, all dented and, and ready to be thrown out."

It was a child's metaphor, in a voice that was just as much like that of a wounded child, and it hurt Aerith's heart so badly so could feel tears pricking her eyes.

"Tifa, I promise you. I _promise_. I don't know when and I don't know how...but we will get out of here. I know it can be done because my mother did for me. And I _promise_ you, I'll get you out. And we'll find the Promised Land my mother told me about, and I...and somehow, we'll be safe. I'll fix this. I will. I can do it there. I just...I'm sure of it." 

Tifa didn't say anything, just pressed her nose against the hollow at Aerith's neck, and began to hum a song she sometimes would sing to herself sometimes when she washed her clothes in their small sink - a song in the dialect of her home, that Aerith couldn't understand a word of - and they lay together, huddled on the narrow bed, and both eventually fell into a fitful, exhausted sleep.

\--

It didn't take Anneke long to get everything squared away - she had been living in a ShinRa dorm in Junon, and they had assigned her into rooms in the ShinRa tower on the floor many of the other scientists lived in. She packed herself up quickly and made the arrangements to have her belongings moved. It was the last day at Junon that had been the hardest, saying good-bye to many of the people she had gotten to know and treated, but she wouldn't lie to herself - she was excited, so much she felt like a child the night before her first day of school, barely able to sleep because new things would be happening soon.

She busied herself the last few days before she began working at ShinRa Tower, after she had already moved in, by wandering around Midgar and trying to get a feel for it. She'd lived there before, briefly, as a student, but that had been below-Plate. Above was like a different world.

She also made sure she would be prepared for whatever Hojo threw at her - she reviewed the surprisingly thin materials on what he was doing, strongly suspecting that much of it had been redacted and would stay that way until she was on-site. But that was fine; safer, she knew, to keep everything on site and run fewer risks of information being stolen or leaked.

Hojo met her when she arrived at the labs the next morning. Hojo was an odd man, and something about him put her off, but she wouldn't deny that the man was a genius. He could be charming, she knew, when he tried to be, but there was something false about it.

She spent her most of first day at ShinRa Tower reading through all of the files she was now provided with - _I was right_ , she thought, _the files I got before were much, much thinner than this_. It was a lot to take in; she spent most of the day at her desk with pen and paper and a highlighter close at hand, jotting notes and marking things that seemed to be of interest.

There was a knock on her office door that broke her concentration. She looked up to see Hojo looking amused in the doorway. "While I appreciate your zeal," he said, and it sounded like he was about to start laughing, "you can go home now."

Anneke was startled when she looked at her clock. "When did it get this late?" she said in surprise - it was almost 2030, well past time for her to have left. "Professor, is it all right if I take these with me?"

He frowned and shook his head. "On-premise only, doctor. Even if you live in ShinRa Tower. This work is at the highest level of security."

She sighed. The highest security level meant all documents were on-site only, and even memory sticks would be scanned before allowed in or out. "Ah. All right. Back tomorrow, then," she said, then rubbed at her eyes.

"Bright and early," Hojo said, his good humor returning. "Tomorrow you start working with the samples."

Anneke felt a tiny smile touch her lips, and Hojo beamed.

\--

It was hard to tell in the cell how much time passed. There were no windows, so they couldn't see the lights of the plate going up or down to mimic the sun - or see the sun itself; Aerith had no idea if they were above Plate or below, or even if they were still in Midgar - and there were no clocks in their cell. The counted the time by when meals arrived and the changing of shifts, and the days by when the scientists came to drag them off into the mako tanks.

The weeks, Aerith counted by how often the troopers lost their temper with Tifa and attacked her, and she had a sinking feeling one was coming up soon, especially since Tifa had seemed so fragile lately. She had a horrible feeling Tifa would lash out sooner rather than later.

They both looked up when they heard the heavy footsteps of troopers coming towards their door. And pretty much as Aerith had feared, Tifa rolled off her bed and onto her feet in a way that never ended well. It just wasn't in Tifa _not_ to fight, no matter hopeless her odds or how many times it ended with her bruised and bloodied. As much as Aerith hated seeing Tifa afterwards, she deep down admired how Tifa refused to make it easier for them. She couldn't stop them, but she wouldn't go easily.

The door opened, with two troopers and a woman Aerith had never seen before instead of the researcher who had always been there, coming in. "Both of you, on your feet and hands where I can see them!" one yelled, as the other readied his bracer.

Aerith knew that one by his voice and she felt her stomach instantly go as cold as a Blizzaga. She didn't know his name - or any of their names - but she knew his voice, and he was the more vicious of the troopers, the one who seemed to hate Tifa the most and who got violent the fastest. He was the one who had first broken Tifa's jaws, all those weeks or months ago, and quickest to hit with the butt of his rifle. Aerith got off of her bed meekly, hands raised, and she watched the woman out of the corner of her eye to see how she reacted.

Her reaction was one that made the first touch of hope Aerith had felt in a long time rise tentatively in her. The woman actually looked slightly stunned by both the troopers actions and then Aerith's own overly subservient one. While Aerith normally did as she was told, she played it up today, specifically to see what the woman would do. The woman's slight frown and double take indicated that whatever she'd been expecting, it hadn't been _this_.

Tifa was also frowning at Aerith's reaction, and it seemed to make her belligerent mood worse, which was the last thing Aerith wanted. She narrowed her eyes, and instead of raising her hands, she went out of her tense position into what Aerith knew by now was one of her fighting stances - and it was one of her more versatile ones, one she called a cat stance, where her weight was deceptively mostly on her back leg instead of equally balanced like it looked, so she could attack as fast as a Thundaga bolt from it.

"I SAID hands where I can see them!"

"You can see them," Tifa said, a combative smile on her face that was all teeth. "Look, they're right here. Want a closer look?" she asked almost sweetly, making her hands into fists and holding them in such a way that Aerith knew the second that trooper got near her, Tifa was going to launch an almost blindingly fast attack.

"Tifa!" Aerith yelled, "Please! Don't antagonize him, you know he--!"

"You and your godsbedamned smart mouth," the trooper said, ignoring Aerith. He had a short temper, and Tifa was very, very good at setting it off. He stepped forward and lifted his rifle, clearly intending to hit Tifa with the butt of it before she could strike at him, when the woman beside him let out a sharp, "Trooper, stand down!"

The trooper startled, instantly reacting to the command in it, and even Tifa did a double take at it. Aerith felt her own eyes go wide at the sharpness in the other woman's voice.

"But ma'am," the trooper began, "This one is--"

" _Sir_ ," she snapped, narrowing her eyes as she corrected him. "I was ShinRa military before I shifted into the medical and research side, and you will respect that. And you will obey my orders, _without comment or excuses_ , or I will have you demoted back down to 'private' so fast your head will spin, _corporal_."

The woman then gave him a tight smile, and Aerith just blinked. "Or, if 'sir' is too difficult, how is 'Sergeant Major'? I was a ShinRa _army_ medic, _corporal_ , before I completed my medical training, and the 'army' part wasn't for show. I started OUT with a higher rank than you. So _stand down_."

"Sir!" the trooper said sharply, going stiff as he realized just how much she outranked him, and Aerith and Tifa looked at each other.

"Good to see we're on the same page. Do _not_ contradict me again," the woman said, narrowing her eyes. Her spine was ramrod straight, almost as if made of steel.

"Sir, yes, sir!" he barked quickly, and stood down stiffly.

The woman turned to face them, and gave them both a faint smile as the steel in her spine seemed to soften. "Hello. My name is Dr. Anneke Laumbe. I've been brought on to keep track of and take care of you two," she said, and Aerith was shocked at being spoken to, after all these endless days, weeks, and months, like a person. The small touch of hope she had felt before grew stronger at it - the only way her mother had been able to escape with her all those years ago was because of her father. She didn't know this woman, but if she really did see them not as "samples" but as _humans_ , deserving of the courtesy of an introduction...

It may have been only the slimmest of chances, but she would take it; would grasp at it with both hands as desperately as she could.

"My--my name is Aerith," she said, swallowing and stepping forward, and letting a bright smile come onto her face. "And this is Tifa," she said, gesturing at Tifa.

Tifa's jaw clinched, and she said nothing, just kept her wary gaze on the trooper and stayed in fighting stance.

"Pleased to meet you," the woman said, giving them a faint bow, and both of the troopers were open-mouthed at Laumbe. _I can work with this_ , Aerith thought. _And I have to._ "Let's begin then, shall we?" she said brightly. Then she turned to level a sharp glare at the trooper who was always the most violent with them. "After the Confuse has been cast, you will _stand down_ until I give the order not to," she said. "Only if there is a _clear and present danger_ of injury will you be given permission to lay hands on _either_ of them. And you will keep your firearm holstered until otherwise authorized. _Am I clear_?" she said, narrowing her eyes.

"Yes, sir," the trooper said, with a look on his face like he had tasted curdled milk. "Understood, sir."

"Good," she said. "Ladies, I believe you know the drill. Let's just go ahead and get started, since I don't want to start out behind schedule. Derrison, if you please," she said through tightened lips while giving the other trooper a nod, and he raised his arm with the bracer and cast.

\--

_The winter is beginning to break._

_It is still bitterly cold, since they're close to the mountains, but Tifa had grown up in these mountains, and she knows what the air feels like when the season is finally changing._

_She doesn't know why they were back in Narsland, since her master has always refused to answer whenever she asks where they're going. She accepts that she must simply trust in him and go where he leads. He is her master and he is sometimes capricious and inscrutable. But he is still teaching her, and she wants him to continue, so she has learned to bite back her questions, for all it galls her not to know._

_But now she knows. She knows this area, this valley. She knows it best from the other side, but still, she knows it._

_They are close to Nibelheim. She is close to home._

_She won't ask him to take her home. She doesn't know if she wants to go; if she is ready to go...or if she's ready to not go; if they continue past Nibelheim, no closer than they are now. She's not sure which will hurt more, seeing it or being so close and not knowing what has become of it._

_They walk through the valley without a word. The valley is patchy with half-melted snow, but peaking through is the surest sign yet of spring - the delicate purple bergtränen flowers, which have begun to fill the valley with their scent._

_She is so close to home she can taste it. Mt. Nibel is looming before them, and once they cross it, only a day or so..._

_Her master stops abruptly. "You know where we are," he said, turning towards her._

_Tifa nodded._

_"Do you know why we're here?"_

_She shook her head, not knowing where this conversation could be going._

_"We are going back to Nibelheim. Because you are going to see," her master says, his voice as blanks as his smooth, featureless face, "exactly what there is for you in your old home. You still rage, loudly, and rail against ShinRa despite everything I have told you. So you must see for yourself, since my words consistently fall on deaf ears. You will see exactly what ShinRa has done and the power they have."_

_He turns and walks away. Tifa stands there, open-mouthed, and the wind blows through the flowers; the scent of the bergtränen filling the air and her nose, obliterating all else._

\--

Anneke was preparing for a fight, but she had already decided she would not be backing down.

"I want Trooper Oritz removed from this assignment," Anneke said, deciding not to waste any time on a preamble once the door closed behind her in Hojo's office.

Hojo raised an eyebrow. "Oh? I've no idea who he is; they all look alike with their helmets. Why do you want him removed?"

"He is unnecessarily violent and antagonistic towards the test subjects. Tifa - XVIII," she said to his blank look, "in particular." After she had seen how he had reacted to Tifa, Anneke had gone back through their notes on the subjects, and had seen redacted medical reports of injuries. She had no idea how badly Tifa had been injured, but Anneke was no fool.

"Ahh, yes, that one. Yes, he has been a bit of a problem. Hot headed. But," Hojo said, giving her a shrug, "he is also good at handling XVIII. She is...violent, when she wishes to be."

Anneke felt her eyes narrowing - it didn't make sense that a volunteer subject would be a violent case, let alone so violent she required such harsh treatment, and if she was that violent, why under the _Heavens_ were they using her as a test for _SOLDIER_? It seemed like a disaster waiting to happen. "Why is she so violent?"

Hojo looked annoyed. "Why should I know? You are the one with a knowledge of psychiatry. That IS why you were brought on," he said sharply. "Calm her down."

Anneke felt her chin raise defensively. "Then get rid of Oritz. As long as he's there, she will likely remain antagonistic. I can tell you that right now. And that will likely get worse as she undergoes SOLDIER training."

"Changing the rotation will be difficult."

"Why do I even need two troopers? I _am_ already equipped with a bracer and I _did_ serve in the war, so I'm strong enough to cast rudimentary materia spells without problems. Instead of one trooper guarding and one casting, give me one trooper and a Confuse of my own."

"Now Anneke..." he began, and she felt herself bristling.

"I have handled full SOLDIERs in the midst of war flashbacks on my _own_ , professor. That is why I am _here_ , is it not? I will not be able to 'handle' them if they see me with the enemy. And Oritz is the enemy to them, that much was very clear."

Hojo waved a hand in the air. "Fine, fine, if you think you can handle the samples without as much backup, I don't care. The idea for bringing you on was so I would not be bothered with these mundane trivialities."

She fought the urge to grind her teeth. "Thank you, sir," she said instead.

"Is that all?"

"Not quite. I'd also like to change procedure a bit. I think it might be best to cast Confuse closer to insertion in the tanks. It just seems...cruel to do so in their room. As well as dangerous. It means there is greater need for restraints and a greater risk for injury."

"The troopers are armed and wearing armor. XVIII can't injure them too badly."

"I wasn't talking about them, I was talking about _her_. And, if she is starting the SOLDIER process, her not being able to injure them unarmed will not last long. Trust me on that," Anneke said darkly. It was suddenly clear to her that Hojo was underestimating what exactly a SOLDIER was capable of, for all he was the father of the project. Or perhaps he was underestimating his test subjects because they were women. Either way, something like that could be a fatal mistake, and she would be damned if she would be the one paying for it.

She had let her guard down once around an unstable SOLDIER. And it was why she had never gone unequipped again. She still had nightmares, of glowing brown eyes too close to her own, and the feeling of rock-hard hands in an unbreakable grip around her throat before being thrown like a rag doll across the room.

Underestimating SOLDIERs was not a mistake she ever made again.

"Anneke, I am a busy man. These petty logistical details are taking time away from my research. Do whatever you want with the rotation. I don't want to be bothered with anything that's not data. Am I clear?"

"Yes, sir."

"You may go," he said dismissively, looking back down towards the paperwork he'd been looking at when she came in. "I'll send you the personnel roster so you can adjust it to your liking. _This is your job_ , not mine," he said, and she could tell when she had been dismissed.

"Thank you, sir," she said, standing and giving a bow even though he didn't bother to look up, and she felt a small thrill at the carte blanche that his words meant.

\--

When Tifa finally opened her mouth to speak, her words were not what Aerith was expecting.

"Why are you sucking up to them? To that…that _bitch_?"

Tifa almost never swore, and the few times she did, she always tripped over the words a bit. Because she used them so rarely, the times she did, they always felt stronger and more vehement than the casual and vulgar curses of the troopers are them. Aerith found herself slightly taken aback by them, but decided it wasn't the time to address whatever had caused so much instant venom.

"Because she might be a way out," Aerith said simply. They were curled up on Tifa's bed, as they often were after the experiments now. Tifa still woke too slowly, but she seemed to come back to herself faster this way, and Aerith wouldn't lie to herself and say she didn't find her own comfort in being so close to another person after whatever it was they ShinRa scientists were doing to them. Tifa's nose was pressed against the hollow of Aerith's throat, and being so close, Aerith could feel all the tension practically radiating off of the other woman. Tifa had been awake for a long time before she'd spoken, first lax then trembling as she tried to put herself together, then slowly growing tenser and tenser, all the while not making a sound. "We can't stay here, Tifa. We can't. But we can't escape on our own. There's no way we can get out without help. We're going to need someone on the inside to help us out, or we'll be here until we rot. Or Hojo is finished with us," she said, bitterly. "And I don't even want to think about what kind of state we'll be in by then."

"I don't like her. I don't trust her," Tifa finally said, her voice shaking slightly, and still with that too-young tinge it had when she was still recovering. "She's a scientist! She put us in that tank. She--she _ordered_ them to hit me with that Confuse like it was _nothing_."

"That's neither here nor there," Aerith replied sharply. She softened the snappish words by twining her hand in Tifa's long hair and letting out a sigh. "Just...just play nice with her. We have to make her see us as _people_. Not...not _samples_. Not _subjects_. _People_. We need her to let her guard down around us so we can escape."

"I'm _not_ sucking up to her," Tifa said hotly. She tightened her hands around the cloth of Aerith's scrubs at her waist. "I won't do it."

"Then don't," Aerith said, putting her chin on the top of Tifa's head. Tifa let out her own sigh, and Aerith could feel the soft flutter of the other woman's eyelashes against her neck as she closed her eyes. "But _I_ will, Tifa. I'll do whatever I have to to get us out of here. We have to go, and sooner rather than later," she ended, biting her lip. She didn't want to say it, but the creeping wrongness she'd felt in Tifa was growing, and growing faster than ever, and there was something about it that terrified Aerith in a more unsettling way than she had words to express. "And this is the only way I can see to do it. It's the only way that I know _can_ work. Security is too tight on us. We need someone on the inside to help up, or we'll be lab rats forever."

"I don't like it," Tifa said in a small, tight voice.

"It doesn't matter," Aerith said softly, and rubbed her cheek against the top of Tifa's head. "And for the record, I don't like it, either. But I'll do what I have to to get us out of here."

"You act like I'm helpless," Tifa said. "Like I can't help."

Aerith laughed. "'Helpless' is the _last_ word I'd use for you. But you're...you're so straightforward and honest. And that's _good_ ," Aerith said vehemently, hugging Tifa at her words. "But it won't get us out. It's a detriment in this...this twisted place. I've been dealing with ShinRa a lot longer than you have, and I grew up under the Plate, in some pretty tough areas," Aerith said. "I can play their game a little better.

"Besides, we're a team. We have to work together!" Aerith said with a smile. It didn't matter if Tifa couldn't see it; she'd hear it in her voice. "I butter her up so we get out, you beat the daylights out of everyone in our way. I'm...I'm not so good at that part."

Tifa laughed. "You've got a point. I'm way better at punching the stuffing out of people and at blowing things sky high."

"I'm leaving it to you to leave this place in shambles," Aerith said, relieved to hear Tifa's soft laugh.

"I will," Tifa said, her voice more muffled as she pressed her face slightly closer to Aerith's neck. "I'll burn it to the ground, same as they did to...to...I won't let anyone touch you once we get out of this cell. I _promise_."

"I'm holding you to that," Aerith said, her voice barely above a whisper, and she bit her lip, hoping that they wouldn't get out too late. She didn't know why Tifa had changed what she was going to say mid-word, but she didn't think it was because Tifa didn't want to talk about it. She'd sounded like she either couldn't gather the thought or couldn't recall it, and neither boded well. The tendrils were growing; were beginning to burrow into TIfa even more, no matter what Aerith did. It was beyond her ability to fix, but she hoped...if they could get to her mother's Promised Land, then maybe...

Long moments passed, before Tifa spoke, her voice sounding half-asleep. "I wonder what season it is."

"It's been so long. But...maybe spring? I'd like it to be spring."

"Me, too," Tifa said. "There were flowers that bloomed in very early spring, little purple ones that had the most amazing smell. They were called...they were...they... They were little purple flowers that would fill the entire little valley near home with their scent. It's how we knew spring had come, when we saw them starting to peep through the snow."

"We'll have to go see them when we get out," Aerith said, not missing how Tifa had struggled, and Tifa nodded.

"Tell me about them. About Nibelheim," Aerith said, and haltingly, her thoughts broken in places and fractured; stuttering and tripping over words and names that wouldn't come, Tifa did.

Or rather...Tifa _tried_. And that was enough.

\--

_Dr. L has arrived, and is making changes that will hopefully end these ridiculous uncontrolled-for eruptions. And also she hopefully will not bother me with anymore tedious interruptions. Especially now that we are at a delicate stage._

_I will be leaving the day after tomorrow to obtain data on the samples who had been able to defeat S. They are both quite disappointing - I am more and more convinced that it was a fluke they defeated S - but they should provide suitable control data for Project O, especially the male Nibelheim sample. When I return, we will begin full genetic manipulation of the samples in Midgar using the Jenova cells. The Midgar Nibelheim sample has been showing signs of mild mako poisoning, as well as responding as expected to Compound 164, and the introduction of Jenova cells should speed this process. There are also reports of growing closeness in the Midgar samples along with the XVIII-A sample using her abilities as an Ancient on XVIII, all of which mean the imprinting stage should go more smoothly (it is also hoped that splicing genes from the full-blooded Jenova sample into XVIII-A will increase her own abilities as an Ancient, since she is only half). If that does happen, I may use the other Midgar sample to see if that makes more feasible as a clone of SOLDIER Z instead of an S. clone, since both were utter failures in that respect. The male Nibelheim sample may not be a complete waste, if this research proves fruitful._

_All in all, these are exciting times._

Hojo's notes on subject XVIII, p. 597

\--

Anneke sat back in her chair with a sigh. Professor Hojo was almost ridiculously demanding when it came to documentation. _For everyone but himself,_ she thought in annoyance, because the man was well-known for his ability to push off paperwork he saw as beneath him onto other people, as Anneke had learned to her detriment. 'Project assistant' had also translated into "paperwork monkey," and when she wasn't documenting every speck of information she had observed or obtained from the test subjects, she was was doing Hojo's abandoned paperwork.

Still, it would be good to make herself somewhat invaluable to him. Anneke wasn't the most ambitious of people, but she also wasn't completely lacking in it, either - while she would have been content out in Junon, she'd take advantage of this chance to make a name for herself. She knew that it was because of her experience with SOLDIERs that had her out here, but she wasn't completely sure how treating SOLDIERs with PTSD exactly translated into overseeing an experiment to test if women could be brought into the project, other than she would know better than most signs of mental distress, but she wouldn't question it.

She frowned suddenly. She knew signs of PTSD, yes, but neither of the test subjects should be experiencing that. The SOLIDER program had strict psychological requirements, made stricter after the (highly classified) desertion of Generals Hewley and Rhapsodos, followed by the even more highly-classified loss of General Sephiroth and Lt. Fair. She'd only met one of them, General Hewley, when she was stationed in Wutai, and it was hardly under the best of circumstances - in the middle of a pitched battle, spells and gunfire thick in the air, and she'd still been a combat medic, trying to make it through to the injured. He'd seen her, yelled, "YOU! You're a medic?!" then was grabbing her arm and dragging her even more into the thick of it, keeping the enemies off of her while she clutched at her medical kit and tried to keep up. He dragged he over to several badly-injured men, and kept the Chochung projectiles and attacks off of her while she worked. She'd done her best, but Cure, Life, phoenix downs, and modern medicine only went so far, and two of the men still died before reinforcements could arrive.

Hewley'd been a good man, and she could tell the loss of men he'd tried to get help for weighed on him. Years later, when she looked back on both what she'd seen of him that day, and the few rumors she'd heard about his disappearance (and presumed death), and with what she knew now, she had no doubt the war had been more than he could stand, and perhaps it had been that more than anything else that had defeated him.

But that had nothing to do with her situation now. She specialized in PTSD. There was no reason two healthy girls who had _volunteered_ for this would be under the same stresses as troopers and SOLDIERs who had seen warfare. She wasn't the only psychiatrist ShinRa had; why bring her on?

Something about the situation nagged at her, but she put it out of her mind. Who was she to question her luck?

 _Still_ , she thought, _I need to observe them carefully. I need to get a baseline for who they are, so if I see a problem developing, I can say something. I'll talk to them a bit_ , she decided, _get a read on them. How can I catch a problem if I don't know them first?_

Likely that was it. It would be easier for her, a woman, to talk to two young women, and she would know if the mako was making a difference, or if the testing was getting to them. While there were other psychiatrists, there were very few women psychiatrists on the ShinRa rolls, and even fewer who knew what SOLDIERs were like and had heard from them what the process was like and the stresses that alone caused.

 _So it's decided_ , she thought, and nodded once to herself. _They're my patients AND my subjects. I want this to go well, and if Hojo wanted a psychiatrist to assist him, well, it had to be for a reason, so that's what he's getting for them._

Still. Something didn't quite... _I'll look over the notes again_ , she thought. _There's got to be a hint in there why Hojo would want to bring on a psychiatrist rather than a researcher._

That settled, she picked up her pen and went back to filling out the mountain of paperwork Hojo had left behind.

\--

It was morning, and Aerith was guessing by the way her stomach woke her up that it had to be close to breakfast time. What day - how long since before they went into the tanks, or since they were brought back - she had no way of knowing, and it had long ago ceased being anything relevant. The routine was the same, even if the particulars were unclear.

The routine changed, however, when instead of the food being shoved unceremoniously through a slot in the door, the door instead opened, and the scientist from yesterday walked in, a wary trooper carrying two trays of food.

"Good morning, ladies," the woman said. "How are you?"

Both Aerith and TIfa just stared at her, dumbfounded. They looked at each other, before they looked back at the woman, and Aerith finally let out a confused, "Fine...?", her voice rising to make it a question. The trooper seemed just as wary as they did as he put the trays of food down, for all Aerith couldn't see his face.

The woman - Laumbe, if Aerith recalled correctly - blinked slightly at their reaction, then continued. "I was unaware that was such a difficult question. And there really is no right answer to 'How are you', other than a lie. You don't need my approval for your answer."

Tifa continued to stare at Laumbe. Tifa's bewildered and distrustful stare seemed to make Laumbe stumble somewhat. She focused her attention on Aerith.

"Is there anything that you need? It does seem like your accommodations are a bit...austere," she said, seeming to search for a delicate way to describe the sparse room. Both she and Tifa were wearing a pair of scrubs, with their clothes from _before_ carefully hung and drying on the rungs of their bed frames.

"That's...that's one way to describe it," Aerith said, forcing a smile, falsely bright, to flicker across her face. _Be friendly_ , she thought. _Make her like you._

"Is there anything you need?" the woman asked again, giving the room a quick sweep with her eyes, then looking back to Aerith.

Tifa continued to stare, frowning. She only took her eyes away from the woman's face to take in the bracelet at her wrist, one very clearly equipped with materia.

"We're fine," Aerith finally said. "As much as we can be, anyway. But...a hair brush or two wouldn't go amiss."

That line made the doctor frown slightly, but the expression was quickly gone. "All right," she said, giving Aerith, and then Tifa, a small smile.

Aerith returned it; Tifa did not.

"Enjoy your breakfast. I just wanted to check in on you this morning. If you need anything, please, let me know," she said, and gestured with her head for the trooper to leave. "Good-bye," she said as she left, and Aerith and Tifa looked at each other again.

\--

"Ma'am," the trooper said once the door was closed. "I just want to state again that I don't think it's a good idea to go in there without armed escort."

"Nothing happened," Anneke said, feeling annoyed.

"This time," the trooper, Gonzales, said. "The red-headed one is usually OK, but the other one, that brown-haired girl...she's dangerous, ma'am."

"But all she did was glare at me. I've faced worse."

" _This time_ ," Gonzales repeated. "But ma'am, she's dangerous. She's a _terrorist_ , did you know that? And a trained fighter. When she goes on the beserker, it takes at least two troopers to contain her."

"Again, noted," Anneke said.

"There should be two troopers at all times," he said, as if he had to say it to her before they even got to the door.

"I have seen combat, trooper," Anneke said, beginning to feel annoyed. "And I have faced down SOLDIERs, _alone_ , having war flashbacks, and done it armed only with a bracer equipped with Sleep. Are you trying to tell me I should be afraid of two girls barely old enough for their Coming of Age?"

The trooper faltered at Anneke's sharp tone.

Anneke continued, irritated at once _again_ having to assert herself and her orders. "Your concerns are appreciated and noted. However, my orders - and make no mistake, these are _orders_ , trooper - stand. I have seen how some of you treat those girls and it is of _no_ surprise to me that one of them is violent. You bring it some of it on yourselves, and it is going to stop.

"Get used to the new status quo, Gonzales. If you're so afraid of a teenaged girl, perhaps you should be reassigned."

She would give Gonzales credit. He didn't shrink back at the subtle insult. "I served in Wutai as well, ma'am. And that's how I _know_ teenaged girls can be just as deadly as full-grown men. The teenaged girls over there would go just as suicider as their men. So...so just _please_ don't underestimate her. Either of them."

Anneke softened slightly. "Noted," she said, but this time gave him a slight smile. "If there's even the slightest hint of this going south, we'll up the security. But let's see for now, all right?" She tapped her bracer. "These has served me well. I _will_ use it if I need to." 

"Thank you, ma'am."

"Now. I have some work to do. Thank you for your concern. Really," she said, putting a hand on his shoulder.

"You're welcome, ma'am," he said, and Anneke dropped her hand and headed towards her office, mulling over his words - specifically that she was a "terrorist."

There had been no mention of that in the files. She frowned as she closed the door to her office as she realized there had been no mention at _all_ of not only the girl being a terrorist, but of her past. For either of them.

She sat down at her desk, and tapped her finger against it as she thought.

\-- 

The doctor was carrying a bag, and that put Tifa on the defensive. Aerith could see it instantly, the wariness that shot through the other woman like an electric shock.

"I know it's been a few days, but I believe you asked for this," the doctor said brightly, seeming to ignore the way that all of Tifa's hackles went up, and she pulled two hairbrushes out of the bag. "I hadn't had time to go out shopping until yesterday."

Aerith blinked. She hadn't honestly expected the ShinRa doctor to listen to her request, let alone grant it. "I...thank you," she said, taking them from Laumbe. It was a small thing, a _simple_ thing, and yet it sent waves of gratitude through her. She fought the urge to clutch them to her chest when she had them in her hands; something so small and yet something so _normal_ , something that had been kept from them for so long, something that made them _human_.

"Had they not given you hairbrushes before?" the doctor asked, her eyes slightly wide. Aerate wondered how much she had given away, then felt something in her go cold and calculating.

"No," she said, choosing to give into the urge to clutch the brushes to her chest. "We've been given the very basics - toothbrushes, toilet paper, soap, two changes of clothes, other necessities - but someone must have decided brushes were too dangerous.

"Too dangerous? It's a hairbrush!" 

_Sorry Tifa_ , Aerith thought, then continued. "They don't trust us with anything that could be made into a weapon. I'm almost amazed they gave us toothbrushes."

The woman looked mildly appalled, but Aerith knew that above all else she had to be _careful_ \- push too hard and Laumbe might see through it, go too slowly and she might get swallowed up into the ShinRa mindset.

"Thank you," Aerith said instead, and tried to let all of the gratitude at them that she genuinely did feel come out. 

"It...it was nothing," Laumbe said, but she looked troubled, and inside, Aerith let out a shout for joy.

\--

_I have returned from the second testing site and examined Sample Z and C. I am more certain that C will make an excellent control sample. I switched them to a dummy solution to return their readings to a baseline, and will monitor both Nibelheim samples as things progress. I almost wish I had sent Dr. L there instead of assigning her to Project O, but I can not deny that since she has started working here, there have been fewer disruptions with XVIII and fewer injury reports on her, which should ensure it is at an optimal baseline, as well as allow to me see if pain had had an effect on her absorption of the compounds. It can be reintroduced if there is a lessening of absorption rates._

_It will also be interesting to see the effects on XVIII-A as theJenova cells are introduced. Will this strengthen its abilities as an Ancient, I wonder? Tests will definitely need to be performed._

Hojo's notes on subject XVIII, p. 632

\--

_The winter is beginning to break._

_It is still bitterly cold, since they're close to the mountains, but she had grown up in these mountains, and she knows what the air feels like when the season is finally changing._

_She doesn't know why they were back in this area, since her master has always refused to answer whenever she asks where they're going. She accepts that she must simply trust in him and go where he leads. He is her master and he is sometimes capricious and inscrutable. But he is still teaching her, and she wants him to continue, so she has learned to bite back her questions, for all it galls her not to know._

_But now she knows. She knows this area, this valley. She knows it best from the other side, but still, she_ knows _it._

 _They are close to her hometown. She is close to_ home.

_She won't ask him to take her home. She doesn't know if she wants to go; if she is ready to go...or if she's ready to not go; if they continue past the town, no closer than they are now. She's not sure which will hurt more, seeing it or being so close and not knowing what has become of it._

_They walk through the valley without a word. The valley is patchy with half-melted snow, but peaking through is the surest sign yet of spring - the delicate purple flowers, which have begun to fill the valley with their scent._

_She is so close to home she can taste it. The mountain is looming before them, and once they cross it, only a day or so..._

_Her master stops abruptly. "You know where we are," he said, turning towards her._

_She nodded._

_"Do you know why we're here?"_

_She shook her head, not knowing where this conversation could be going._

_"We are going back to town. Because you are going to see," her master says, his voice as blanks as his smooth, featureless face, "exactly what there is for you in your old home. You still rage, loudly, and rail against ShinRa despite everything I have told you. So you must see for yourself, since my words consistently fall on deaf ears. You will see exactly what ShinRa has done and the power they have."_

_He turns and walks away. She stands there, open-mouthed, and the wind blows through the flowers; the scent of the purple flowers filling her nose and obliterating all other smells before dissolving her nose away._

\--

Something was... _different_. Aerith was unsure exactly what it was, but something was very, very different.

Very, very _wrong_.

She didn’t know what it was that they had done to her, but they had done _something_. Something was different and something was _wrong_.

And it wasn’t just wrong with _her_. 

She could... _hear_ her own heartbeat. It was louder, pounding in her ears. And everything was... _sharp_. It was as if the world had suddenly grown edges where before it was rounded, and the contrast of the world had been turned up several notches. Everything was _more_ , but not like it had been before. Before, she could feel the pulse of life around her, but now...she had always felt as if she could see the strings of life, stitching it all together, but now she could see how to pull it apart instead of knitting it stronger, and something about that left her feeling _cold_.

She realized she was shivering. She didn't know when she had started, or why, but...

Her teeth were chattering and she was shivering and shaking and everything was so _cold_...

Everything after that was a blur.

\--

She was in Tifa's bed. That wasn't uncommon, not after they woke from the mako, but it was the first time that Aerith had no memory of how she'd gotten there. And this time, she wasn't the one holding Tifa, to see her through the worst of it until she came back to herself - she was instead in Tifa's arms, clinging to her as she would have her mother when she was frightened by nightmares.

The world was still too sharp; the threads of life still too pullable, and she shut her eyes and buried her face against Tifa's shoulder. She felt Tifa stir against her and she clutched at the scratchy, flimsy shirt of Tifa's scrubs even tighter.

 _I can't_ , Aerith thought, suddenly panicked. _I can't be strong, not right now, I can't something is...don't push me away, not right now, I can't, please_...

And Tifa, bless all the gods, didn't push her away as she came to, as she still sometimes did, Tifa only let out a faint, distressed sound of her own, and wrapped her arms tighter around Aerith.

"Something...something is _wrong_ ," Tifa said, her voice sounding strange, and Aerith shut her eyes and pressed her face tighter against Tifa, and then she nodded. She could hear Tifa's heart beating, quick and panicked, and some part of her...some terrifying, _alien_ part that she had never felt before, _relished_ that panic. She nodded again, then tears burst from her eyes and she wept, wept at how the world had been flipped on its axis and turned upside down, at that horrible, hateful feeling inside her that had been somehow put inside of her, and Tifa, first tentatively and then more certain of herself, stroked Aerith's hair until she stopped.

\--

Aerith's feeling that something was very, very wrong with them, something new and terrible, was reaffirmed when she finally blearily looked up and at Tifa.

"Tifa...your _eyes_ ," Aerith blurted out. " _They're...they're..._ "

Tifa's eyes were as round as Aerith knew hers had to be. " _Glowing_ ," she said, and swallowed.

"Yeah. How did you...?" Aerith began.

"Because _yours_ are," Tifa said before she could finish the question, and things suddenly began to make a sick kind of sense. Aerith had seen eyes glowing like that before, like Tifa's - and like hers, for all part of her desperately wanted to reject it - she had seen blue eyes glowing like the sky she never saw.

"SOLDIERs...they're turning us into SOLDIERs," Aerith whispered, more to herself than to Tifa.

"No. No. No, no, no, no, no!" Tifa let out, first slowly, then in a long, panicked stream. "No no no no no, they can't, they--!" she said, jumping out of the bed almost violently. She ran to the mirror and peered at her own reflection; her hands gripping the edges of the sink as she did so.

"No...no no no no no, they can't; I can't be, this is, no--!" she yelled, and suddenly, the edges of the sink made a horrible wrenching sound, as the metal twisted under Tifa's hands.

Tifa let go of the sink and backed away from it as if it were on fire.

She turned to Aerith, her eyes wide and panicked. "I can't...they can't do this to me, I don't want anything to do with ShinRa, or SOLDIERs, especially not SOLDIERs, bot after they...they destroyed my home, destroyed Ni--Ni--my _home_ , they destroyed it, they took it away from me, they can't, they can't, they took my...my father?--and now--!"

Tifa whirled around and ripped the sink out from its fixture to the wall, and slammed it into the mirror, shattering it into a rain of shards, with a loud cry, then hurled it across the room, screaming. Aerith watched, wide-eyed and shocked, as Tifa began to throw everything she could get her hands on, wrenching and twisting metal, yet making not a dent in the walls of their cell.

When everything in the room was all but destroyed, Tifa stood in the middle of the chaos, breathing heavily and blinking back tears of rage, bleeding from her hands and tiny cuts from the shattered mirror that even now were starting to heal as Aerith watched, then Tifa sank abruptly down to her knees with a sob.

Aerith was by Tifa's side before she knew she had moved. It made it easier, it was something _stable_ , to try and calm Tifa down. It was something she could _do_ , despite how inside of her something felt twisted; something that she _understood_ , even if now she could see now how changing a word or caress could break Tifa further. She pushed those alien ideas away as vehemently as Tifa had destroyed the room; rejected those strange and foreign thoughts suddenly inside of her, and did so by clutching tightly to what made her _her_ , at that feeling that told her how to protect instead of _destroy_.

"I can't. I can't, I can't, I just can't be," Tifa said in a broken voice. "They're...everything I hate, everything I fought against, they...they destroyed my home, my father, they..." she said, before her voice cracked. "I can't be a SOLDIER, I _can't_!"

"And you _won't_ ," Aerith said, despite the tendril of wrongness now inside her whispering to say the opposite. "You _won't_ be what they were. You _won't_ do what they did. We won't be what they want us to be. We _won't_!" Aerith said, her voice rising and vehement, and her words both for Tifa and herself. She _wouldn't_ be the thing they were making her into; the thing that could only destroy. She wouldn't be that thing, and she for damn sure wouldn't let _Tifa_ become that thing either.

"We're not going to be SOLDIERs. We're going to be something else entirely," Aerith said, and the certainty in her voice surprised even her. "And they're going to find out the hard way they shouldn't have done this to us."

"No. No, they shouldn't have," Tifa said, and there was fire in her voice.

 _Good girl_ , Aerith thought, and ignored how that alien thing in her seemed to _smile_.

\--

The words came out of Anneke's mouth before she even realized she'd opened her mouth to say them. "What under the heavens--?!"

The room was, to put it kindly, a disaster area. There had clearly been some attempt made to clean, but only so much could be done about a sink ripped from its mooring and flung so hard it was twisted and bent, a smashed mirror, and a bed frame twisted almost beyond repair.

Well. If nothing else, the levels of destruction showed that the reinforcement of the walls for SOLDIER-level punishment had been adequate. Little _else_ had been, but that had been, at the least.

The brown-haired woman, Tifa, glared at her from a corner of the room that she had clearly staked out as her territory. Tifa was sitting in the corner with her knees drawn up and her head buried in her arms, but she'd looked up to glare before dropping her head back, so only the top of her head was visible.

Aerith, the other subject, didn't look much happier to see her. "What are you _doing_ to us?" she said instead, and the anger in her gaze and voice were almost palpable. "Why are you turning us into SOLDIERs?"

Anneke blinked. This was...not what she was expecting. "What happened here?" Anneke said.

"Answer my question!" Aerith yelled.

"Answer mine first," Anneke snapped, unaccustomed and ill-appreciative for being yelled at by those under her care. There were times when it was unavoidable, and times when it was therapeutic, but often it was something needing to be put down and soothed, and quickly. That was even more true when dealing with SOLDIERs, who needed to be calmed quickly - or given a chain of command to follow - when they were having meltdowns.

Suddenly, Anneke could see why Hojo might have wanted someone like her on hand.

"What does it look like?" Tifa said unexpectedly, raising her head. The heat in her gaze was almost palpable, and Anneke found herself mentally reaching for her materia; ready to cast Sleep should the need arise.

"It looks like someone ripped the sink from the wall and threw it into every available surface," Anneke said, keeping her voice mild.

"Aren't you a sharp one," Tifa let out, then wrapped her arms tighter around her knees and glared.

"Well. There's your answer," Aerith said, lifting her jaw. "Will you answer mine now?"

"You're not being turned into SOLDIERs per se," Anneke said, knowing how important it was for honesty right now. Both women looked like they were ready to launch themselves at her throat, and while she'd certainly seen that before, it was unnerving seeing it from someone like Aerith, who until now had been unfailingly polite. "However, you are being treated as prototypes for a plan for potential female SOLDIERs. Until now, the program has been exclusively male. You'll change that," she said, and smiled, filled with pride.

And she realized a second later that she had done the wrong thing.

"Are you fucking _kidding me_?!" Tifa roared, jumping to her feet. "The last fucking _prototype_...your fucking Se-Sephi...that first fucking SOLDIER you _grew_ in your labs, he...he fucking _destroyed_ my home! Burned it all! And the others, they helped him and...and...my father, he...SOLDIERs..."

She broke off, almost incoherent in her rage, her hands balled into fists and her entire body shaking.

"I think you should leave," Aerith said, and there was steel in her voice. "I think you should _leave right now_."

There were times when you stayed. There were times when you pushed. And there were times when you _left_ , and Anneke knew when it was time for which. "I think perhaps you're right," Anneke said, because as suddenly as she was filled with questions and concerns, she knew now was not the time to _push_. Clearly there were things she had not been told and questions she needed to take to Hojo, but more than that, she needed to not be in the room right now - not when people fresh and new to SOLDIER strength were _not_ adjusting well and in no mood to discuss it, and it was clear she would not be able to actually help them adjust, not yet, and might do more harm than good by blundering about not knowing the situation; harm both to them psychologically and to her _physically_. She would return in an hour, after they had both calmed down. "I'll be back, when you're ready to talk," she said mildly. She knew you couldn't force anyone to talk, let alone SOLDIERs, and now was not the time. They needed to process this, and _she_ needed to find out how it was they hadn't known this was going to happen. "I'll leave. It's clear you're upset, and I _do_ want to know why."

Tifa responded to that by screaming, then moving so fast she was almost a blur, picking up the twisted remains of the sink and flinging it at the wall by Anneke's head.

The wall barely dented; the sink crumpled.

"Please. Leave," Aerith said, breathing hard through her nose and each word clipped and careful, and Anneke ducked out of the door as soon as she could get it open, with her heart in her throat and beating far too quickly, and ran.

\--

Hojo looked up from his paperwork with slight annoyance when he heard a firm rapping on his door. It was rare that he felt like paperwork and didn't foist it onto others, but when there was paperwork only he could do, and he was in a mind to be bothered with it, he didn't like being disturbed. And here was someone disturbing him.

He pushed the button for the intercom. "Can it wait?" he said, not bothering with niceties.

"No," Dr. Laumbe's voice said back to him, and Hojo sighed. Laumbe had been good at making sure he was not bothered, all in all, so he figured it must be something in need of his attention.

"Very well," he said crossly, and pushed the button to unlock and open the door. "Come in."

Laumbe walked in stiffly, and sat down in the chair across from just as stiffly. "Professor, something a bit...disturbing has happened."

Hojo put down his pen. "Yes? Can you not handle your job?"

Laumbe bristled. "I can and have. But I have a few...reservations, and things I would like to have cleared up about the project."

"Go on, then."

"First, just to let you know, the reinforcements for SOLDIER-level occupants was insufficient. They are still secure, but...the proper reinforcements were not made, especially given the...history...Lockheart has with violence against troopers," Laumbe said, and frowned as she spoke, as if something were occurring to her. "The walls held, but little else did in light of her...tantrum today," she said, after having seemed to search for the word she wanted. "I would have liked to have been apprised of what reinforcements had and had not been done, so I could have tried to have had the gaps filled," she said, frowning again.

Hojo could tell why she was still single. The woman might have been attractive if only she would smile, but she seemed to prefer screwing her face up like she was smelling something bad. _At least she's good at her job,_ he thought.

"Such as?"

"Lockheart--" she began, and Hojo spoke over her.

"Subject XVIII," he said curtly.

"She has a name."

" _It_ is a _subject_. That is how you will refer to it."

Laumbe blinked and frowned again, then continued without amending her opening. "Ripped the sink from the wall and destroyed it. She--the subject also destroyed their beds. The only thing that held was the wall. The most damage it took was a dent when she flung the sink at wall by my head, which will attest to how much force she--how much force was involved."

"Why did it throw a sink at your head?" Hojo asked, curious despite himself.

"Because I told them they were the tests for allowing women into the SOLDIER program. I thought they would be pleased. They...were not. Which leads me to why I am here."

Hojo gestured for her to go on. He had the feeling things were about to become...tedious.

"And why _are_ you here?" he asked, steepling his fingers together.

Laumbe took a deep breath. "They way they reacted has led me to believe that they did not know what was going to happen, and that if they had, they would not have agreed to it. The way they are acting made it seem as if...as if they had volunteered for or consented to any of this medical testing."

Hojo smiled. "That's because they hadn't. They are _subjects_ , Dr. Laumbe. _Samples_. They have no consent to give or rights to volunteer."

"What do you mean, they didn't volunteer?" Anneke said, sounding horrified, and Hojo groaned on the inside. This is why he hated working with women sometimes; they were far too soft.

"As I said. They are test subjects. Nothing more. XVIII is a terrorist and responsible for more than one power plant bombing. And XVIII-A is an escaped subject. Or rather, a _stolen_ subject. It was stolen by a former employee for his own...purposes. Subject XVIII-A never should have left the labs to begin with. It has been and always _will be_ ShinRa property."

"That's--" Anneke began, seeming more and more appalled as Hojo spoke. "You can't--this is unethical!"

"Unethical?" Hojo said, his voice rising with anger on the last note. "Dr. Laumbe. I have a question for you. Where is it, exactly," Hojo said coldly, "that you think the advances for the SOLDIER program came from?"

Anneke faltered.

"They came from test subjects, born in this lab. It was human testing that created them. And let's take this further," Hojo said, just as coldly, "where do you think our knowledge of treating illness and the progression of illnesses comes from, nothing? Do you think everyone ever used in science signed a nice little waver," he said with a sneer, "before doctors and professors tested new procedures on them? Are you really so naive? Do you have any idea what this could mean for preventing and treating mako poisoning in the future? Right now, the biggest thing limiting the SOLDIER program--and the greatest risk to those working in mako reactors or studying mako--is the risk of mako poisoning. If we do not understand how it works and every step of how the mako disrupts the brain, then we have no hope of ever being able to treat it. Yes, we are inducing mako poisoning in someone with a rare susceptibility due to life-long mako exposure, in order to find a way to undo the damage that is caused. My intended end result," he said, narrowing his eyes, "is that XVIII _not_ be one of the drooling husks that mako poisoning normally ends in. And that if, gods forbid, the subject _does_ give in, that we learn more about how it progresses and better discover how to _treat_ it. Because right now, we have _nothing_.  
 "I was willing," Hojo said, carefully letting a touch of what almost seemed like pain in his voice, "to sacrifice my own _son_ for the sake of improving the world, and you falter over a _terrorist_? Someone who has bombed Midgar and already caused death and destruction? Are you that weak-willed?" he said, and shot a glance at the bracer she kept equipped, than back at her face.  She looked stung by that, and a muscle in her face twitched. 

"Empathy is a laudable trait," he said, lying with a glare, "but it has no place in the laboratory, where sacrifices have to be made for the greater good. What is 'unethical'? To risk countless thousands of lives for two, and two who would see others dead themselves? How many have died in bombs these terrorists have set? How many workers became _mako poisoned_ themselves because of the bombs the very _terrorist_ you're talking about has herself _set_? That last bomb they planted, three workers got mako poisoning. What happened to _them_ , you can lay at _her_ feet. Should she _not_ be a part of their aid?

"And how many people _didn't_ die because the SOLDIERs were able to end the war more quickly? How many will _not_ suffer because of what we learn here from them? You're angry over two when the future lives that could be saved here are in the hundreds of thousands. Have you no sense of balance, or has _empathy_ ," he said, spitting the word out with the same disgust he'd had calling her 'weak,' "robbed you of _that_ as well?" He pushed up his glasses. "It was empathy that first caused you to need that Sleep materia _you yourself_ call a crutch, correct?"

She flinched again, then went ramrod straight as her face went red.

"I understand," she said, her voice quiet and ashamed. "I--I withdraw my objections. If you will excuse me," she said, and gave him a quick bow, not meeting his eyes, before hurrying out of the room.

A slow smile broke out over Hojo's face.

Really, it was far too easy sometimes.

\--

She felt like a fool. She could feel how red her face was, and she _hated_ it.

As much as she hated to admit it, Hojo was _right_. Scientific and medical progress didn't come without sacrifices. Someone had to be the ones they learned for, so they could save countless lives later. What were one or two lives, in the face of countless hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, perhaps millions, that could be aided by what was discovered?

And if what he'd said about Tifa was true, that she was a _terrorist_...

Mako poisoning wasn't _pretty_. It wasn't _nice_ , what it did to someone. It could rip away someone's mind; leave them so they had nothing left. You would be just an empty husk, and it was only if you were lucky, if you were very, _very_ lucky, that you managed to somehow regain some kind of personality and consciousness afterwards. Most, the vast majority, were just left...empty, as if their souls had been ripped right out of their bodies.

That was what had happened to the victims of the last terrorist attack. The one Tifa--XVIII, she told herself firmly--had been involved with.

She couldn't afford to be soft. She couldn't. Anneke already knew the risks of getting too invested in your patients' lives - it was something that was far too easy to do when you listened to them sob through memories of the war - and, as Hojo had pointed out, now kept material equipped at all times as a result of her own weakness and empathy.

 _You have to toughen up, girl_ , she thought to herself. _Think about what this could mean. What we could discover. Who we could one day save._

Anneke closed her eyes, took a deep breath, then raised her head, opened her eyes, and walked forward.

She wouldn't be so weak again.

\--

_Despite the initial...uncertainties regarding Dr. L and her overly anthropomorphizing the test samples, things have at last settled down, and she seems fully invested in the project now. The latest sets of numbers are very exciting. The samples have taken on even more SOLDIER traits. More importantly, XVIII is beginning to show symptoms of mako poisoning, but not nearly to the extent that the other N sample has. Contact with the XVIII-A sample may be why the mako poisoning is developing at a retarded pace. I will increase its mako exposure, as well as introduce some genetic material from the A sample, to see if it either speeds the imprinting process or retards the mako poisoning further - either direction will prove invaluable and may allow recovery of the first N sample._

_To increase the chance of imprinting, however, I believe that reintroducing injury to the XVIII sample may be necessary. There has been a drop off in the A sample using it's abilities as an Ancient since the cessation of injury to XVIII, which may explain why it has been exhibiting them less. If there is no need, of course, it will not expend the energy._

_I will see about reassigning that Trooper Laumbe had removed, but adjust the schedule so he is here on her off days. I wouldn't want to risk her empathy making another unwelcome appearance._

Hojo's notes on subject XVIII, p. 642

\--

Tifa was...not all right.

She hadn't been anything that could be called "all right" for a long time, but it was almost as if being turned into a SOLDIER had broken something inside of her, and Aerith had no idea what to do to fix it.

It didn't help that whatever they had done to her had made it harder for her to hear what was wrong.

"Tifa?"

“What?” Tifa finally said shortly, looking over at Aerith. Until then, she had been sitting on her bed, staring off into nothing with no expression on her face. Just...sitting there, not moving, not looking at anything, not doing _anything_. Tifa wasn't one to normally sit still for very long – she could be still and easily, could almost radiate stillness some times – but it never lasted long, because even her fits of stillness usually only seemed like interludes. But this...it was as if someone had unplugged her, or broken her strings. Or ripped something vital away from her. 

Aerith knew far too well that it was most likely some horrible amalgam of all three.

“Are...Are you OK?” 

Tifa just looked at her. “Are you seriously asking me that question? Here?”

Aerith felt her shoulders slump. “I know that--” she began, then stopped abruptly when the door opened. A scientist, who wasn't Dr. Laumbe, holding a clipboard walked in, accompanied by several troopers, far more than usually came for them, and, most worryingly, who all seemed heavily armed.

Tifa suddenly sprang to life, leaping to her feet with her teeth bared.

“Nuh uh uh,” one of the troopers said, and Aerith felt herself go cold at that voice. 

_Him_. The one that used to enjoy pushing Tifa just so she would attack and then he could hit her. He hadn't been around since that first day Dr. Laumbe had come, but now he was back, and Dr. Laumbe was no where in sight.

Tifa let out a scream and launched herself at him almost instantly, moving so quickly with her new SOLDIER speed that she was almost a blur.

They were apparently anticipating her speed, and she was hit with a Slow almost immediately. It brought her back to normal speed, and then she was hit almost immediately with more spells, until she couldn't movie.

It wouldn't last long, but...

"Miss me?" the Trooper who had long tormented Tifa said with a smile, and Aerith knew things were about to become very, very bad. 

\--

 _They trade off who prepares meals. Her master is used to cooking for himself, and it always surprises her a little for a man to cook his own food--it just wasn't_ like that _back home._

_She had long been the one cooking at home - she had taken over cooking after her mother died - so she is used to it._

_She doesn't really know when she starts doing it. Maybe because it is a nice day--early spring, not too warm and not too cold--there are no monsters about, and the trees are just beginning to bloom a beautiful pale lavender almost the same color as the flowers near home that will be blooming soon. But she starts humming as she cooks, and then that turns into her singing quietly._

_It is a song her mother used to sing, one that is a well-known and traditional song around the area. It is an old song, and so, like most old songs, in dialect._

'Wait, my lass,' the young lad said,  
I'll cross o'er the mountains  
And far to the sea,

And there I'll make my name  
And when I a famed man be,  
You will be my bride'

His lass, she bade him on his way,  
And then to him she said,  
"Where you go, there will I be

If you go to the mountains,  
Then I'll be your path  
And guide you your way home

If you go far 'cross the sea,  
Then I'll be the star  
That lights you back to me

_"Standard," her master says sharply, though his face had no mouth to speak._

_Something in her snaps; breaks. She is tired; it has been a long day of traveling and training, and this small thing is all she has now to connect her to her mother. She knows to only use Standard when they are near people, and until that instant, when she speaks to him, but this--this is her own time, to herself, and she is suddenly angry beyond belief he would try to dictate how she speaks - how she_ sings _\- to herself._ "Ich will nicht!" _she yells angrily._ "Ich will nicht vergessen! Ich werde nicht vergessen!" __

_The open-handed slap her teacher gave her that wiped away her mouth was the first and only time he had ever struck her. Yes, she had been hit by him many times, when he trained her, but this was different; it was something completely devastating in a way that none of the bruises she'd ever gotten from being taught to fight had ever been._

_"You speak using words that have vanished from the world," he said sharply. "Never speak them again, unless you wish to vanish as well."_

_Her teacher walked away from her angrily, and that day was the last that she had a mouth to speak with it at all._

\--

Tifa had often, before Dr. Laumbe started, been in terrible shape after the experiments. But she was so much worse now, and that despite her SOLDIER abilities and strength.

The Troopers had hurt her, very badly, and she'd had to watch as they did so. Tifa was strong, but strength had limits and even SOLDIERs could be hurt, and those damned Troopers had seemed to take the fact that Tifa could take more damage to be a _challenge_. Aerith had screamed at them to stop, had tried to pull them away and get in the way, anything to make them just _stop_ , until they hit her with a Sleep, and then there was nothing until she woke up outside of the tanks, back in their cell, both reeking of mako.

Tifa's body healed faster now, on its own, and that was a small comfort. The bruises that would have been there after a beating were almost gone; the internal damage faded to survivable, the bones already beginning to knit together.

Aerith could feel the power to fix it all in the scraps of life around her, but she could also feel how to rend it all apart; how to slow that healing process down and shatter it, and that _terrified_ her. 

"Tifa...Tifa, are you all right?!" Aerith asked, a note of desperation in her voice.

Tifa didn't answer; just stared up at the ceiling blankly, humming a song she would sometimes sing to herself when she was bored, but in a strange, hesitant and disjointed way that terrified Aerith.

Aerith got off her her bed and walked over to Tifa, and sat down next to her on Tifa's bed.

Tifa didn't move for the longest time, and Aerith could all but feel the pain radiating off of her. But she waited, not sure anymore what the right or wrong thing to do was. So she sat there, hating everything, hating how hurt Tifa was, hating how she didn't trust herself to try and fix it anymore, hated being _here_.

Tifa continued to stare blankly at the ceiling, humming disconcertingly, and Aerith despaired.

Tifa continued to stare at the ceiling, even when she tentatively moved her hand, until her fingers brushed over Aerith's. 

Aerith felt her face crumple, felt something in her bend and break, and she wrapped her hand around Tifa's, so tightly she could feel the bones inside Tifa's hand and fingers being pressed together; clutched at Tifa's hand even though she knew it had to be hurting the other woman, and then she tried to force herself to let go, to stop, to--

"I miss the flowers. What...what were they called? They were blue..." Tifa whispered softly then trailed off, and Aerith began to hum the song Tifa had been humming _wrong_ ; the song that Aerith sudden realized she hadn't heard Tifa sing or hum until now in a very _long_ time, that song from her home, and that was something that scared her far more than the times Tifa had hummed it oblivious to everything around her.

She never sang it anymore, that song in her Narsland dialect that Aerith couldn't make heads or tails of, and hadn't for the gods only knew how long, when before, when they had first arrived, she would sing it to herself almost _fiercely_ , as if to remind herself of who she was.

Aerith had heard it enough times to know how it went, but she wondered how long before it was too late and there was nothing else she could do but hum songs she couldn't sing.

"I'll get us out of here," she said suddenly, almost desperately, breaking off the words and relaxing the grip she had on Tifa's hand. "Somehow, I'm going to get us out of here."

Tifa didn't answer, but she squeezed at Aerith's hand this time, as tightly has Aerith had been to her own, and stared at the ceiling in silence.

\--

Anneke picked up her cup of coffee and took a sip as she read over the paperwork and test results. Things were definitely looking promising - Aerith and Tifa ( _no_ , she told herself. She had almost broken herself of the habit, but it still remained. _They're not "Aerith and Tifa." They're XVIII-A and XVIII_ ) were showing a smoothing out and strengthening of the results of undergoing the SOLDIER process. XVIII's results were worrying, but only insofar as they indicated the beginnings of mako poisoning. But despite that, she was still up and about; still functioning relatively normally, and the results were already intently promising.

She froze just as she was about to take another sip.

"Healing increased...how would they know that?" she said to herself, frowning. There had been notes about XVIII-A using her latent Ancient abilities to heal injuries XVIII had received - and oh, by the gods, just imagine if they could figure out how she did that; it could revolutionize everything they knew about medicine and treatments - but those had ended when Anneke had reassigned the abusive Troopers. So how had...?

She put her coffee mug down. The dates on those results was from a week she had been in Junon. The doctor who had taken her position had asked her to come back for an emergency with one of the SOLDIERs. Hojo had let her go without complaint, and now she found herself suspicious as to why the man, who had a reputation for not playing well with others, hadn't said a word.

It didn't take long to pull up the records and see who had been on staff that day, and her eyes narrowed in anger when she saw Oritz's name before she let out a sharp curse in Narslandish. 

She had had him removed for a _reason_ , and seeing both his name and the notes on injuries and the speed of healing were making her see red.

It was one thing to cause damage in the hopes of improvements for the good of everyone. But this, this was just one man's sadism and cruelty being given sanction, and it was disgusting.

She was putting her foot down on this one.

\--

"What do you want?" Aerith said, instead of a greeting, when Dr. Laumbe walked in.

The older woman flinched slightly, before she frowned. "I came to see how you're doing. And to find out what happened a few weeks ago, when I was away."

Aerith slouched back against the wall instead of sitting up straight on her bed, as she had been when the doors first opened.

"Why do you want to know?" she asked warily.

"Because I think something that _shouldn't_ have happened did. Something I specifically changed the staff assignments here to ensure it didn't. But I need to know exactly _what_."

"That trooper that hates Tifa happened," Aerith said, and she didn't try to keep the bitterness out of her voice. "We're supposedly SOLDIER-equivalent now, right? Didn't mean anything, not when _they've_ got Materia and we don't," she spat out, narrowing her eyes at the equipped bracer Laumbe had equipped.

Laumbe stared at Aerith wide-eyed and seeming shocked at Aerith's outburst, and Aerith found herself not giving a single damn. "Tifa, I'd like your point of view," Laumbe said, turning to face Tifa, and Aerith laughed bitterly before looking away.

Tifa didn't say a word. Not a single thing, just glared daggers at Dr. Laumbe and settled into a sullen silence.

"I can't do anything if you won't talk to me," Laumbe said, and Aerith wanted to scream. "Listen, I know you don't like or trust us, but--"

"Just stop," Aerith interrupted. "Tifa hasn't said anything for...I don't even know how long. Time doesn't matter in here. Two weeks? It's been too long, is what it's been. If _I_ can't get her to talk, you're _really_ not going to."

Laumbe looked shocked. "What?"

"She hasn't said anything. Not a word," Aerith said, and she felt as if her heart were breaking. She wanted to hold on to her anger, but she couldn't, not in the face of something like this and someone, even if it was fake, seeming like maybe they cared. There had been nothing but silence from Tifa since that horrible day. She would sometimes hum brokenly, but there hadn't been any words. Not a single one. Tifa would nod or shake her head, and she would gesture, but...but nothing else. And the worst thing was, Tifa was acting as if she had _always_ been mute; as if she had never had words to speak, and it terrified Aerith to no end, because when she reached out, with that part of her that was _old_ , all there was in Tifa was a black nothingness; as if the tendrils of wrong she had felt for so long had eaten away like ivy at the structures underneath, and they had all started to crumble away into dust.

"This is...I should have been notified of this," Laumbe said, seemingly more to herself than to Aerith or Tifa. 

Aerith laughed. She couldn't help it, and the laugh felt wrong. "Who would have told you? Do you think anyone listens to us, let alone even _talks_ to us? Says more to us than to bark orders? They all probably think it's better if we can't talk," she ended in a mutter, the words bitter, as they anger came back.

"Well, I'm talking to you," Laumbe said, frowning. "And I want to know what happened. Now more than ever."

"What _happened_ is ShinRa kidnapped us. What _happened_ is ShinRa is running sick experiments on us just because they can. What _happened_ is that they're destroying us, bit by bit, eating away at what we are, just because we're not _people_ to anyone here. Just _samples_."

Aerith remembered all too well, the days and weeks leading up to she and her mother escaping; remembered her mother telling her, fervently, that her name was not "the impure sample." And then to be back here, to be back to being 'sample', being XVIII-A, not even the 'name' she'd had as a child...

"They're doing worse than killing us," Aerith said, and looked away, looked at the corner, so she wouldn't burst into tears.

It didn't work. It didn't stop them. But it at least slowed them, made them something should could blink away and ignore.

There was a long silence before she heard the sound of a door opening.  
 She almost thought she heard a whispered, "I'm sorry" before the door closed shut again.

\--

_Upon Dr. Laumbe discovering that the Trooper she has issues with had been reassigned back to the project, she threatened to quit the project unless he was removed permanently, I've had to temporarily remove him. It's tedious to find another Trooper as capable as him in regards to pain experiments, but not impossible, whereas replacing Laumbe would be far more tedious, despite her tendencies. She is mostly on board and hasn't raised any objections otherwise, so I can throw her this bone._

_More importantly, XVIII is showing definite signs of mako poisoning, and, most promisingly, despite this, she is far more functional than the other Nibelheim sample was at this same stage of poisoning, and she shows signs of mirroring what XVIII-A does, meaning she may be developing Ohnegesichterin 'face stealing' traits and imprinting. There does seem to be some flow in the opposite direction, as evidence by Dr. Laumbe's notes about XVIII-A being more angry than it used to be, but that is of little matter, provided it is small. It could, in fact, but useful, if that blowback can be used to make the Z sample more pliant._

_If this continues as I hope, I may be able to both recover the first Nibelheim sample and the SOLDIER Z sample as well._

Hojo's notes on subject XVIII, p. 692

\--

After several hours of staring at the ceiling of her bedroom and realizing that no matter how long she stared at it, she was never going to go to sleep, Anneke heaved a signed and got out of bed. She headed to her kitchen and began making herself a cup of herbal tea. She was able to keep herself from thinking while she was making it, but while she waited for it to brew, her thoughts finally broke through. The conversation with-- _the samples_ , she told herself firmly--had gotten to her more than she would have liked. She wished she could have taken some of the files home with here, but Hojo had been insistent that everything stay on site.

Hojo was right. She _knew_ he was right...she kept telling herself she was right. This was the ugly side of medical progress. It was something that sometimes had to happen. Sometimes people had to suffer, in order to soothe the suffering of countless afterwards.

But by the gods, it was hard. It was so _hard_.

It just didn't make sense for Tifa to have gone mute. Or rather...yes, that was a sign of mako poisoning, but it was a sign insofar as once someone was so far mako poisoning that there was nothing left of them that they _couldn't_ talk, but this was...this was something very different. It could have been trauma-induced, but that was very rare in adults, and Tifa had shown no signs that her trauma would manifest like this. It was possible that it was something medical, because the gods knew mako could do strange things to you, but it also could have been psychological, and...

She felt the urge to scream as she felt herself being pulled in two very different directions. If it was medical, she was to document the effects on her sample and watch how it progressed. But if it were psychological...

If it was psychological, she was to treat her patient, and a patient...a patient could not be a _sample_.

Hojo was _right_. This is what _had_ to happen, she _had_ to let it go, to _not_ let it get to her.

She kept telling herself that as she drank her tea, and she kept trying to make herself believe it.

\--

When their food came that morning, Aerith looked up briefly when the slots opened, but she couldn't bring herself to get up to get them. She felt so tired, even though she'd just woken up. She wanted to close her eyes and drift back off to sleep. It was easier to spend the days like that, just...drifting.

A piece of bread was unceremoniously dropped on her face.

"What on--!" she started, knocking it off her face and sitting up. Tifa was standing at her bed, holding a tray of food. She pushed it out towards Aerith, and Aerith sighed. "Fine, fine, I'm up," she said, and took the tray. Tifa nodded, then went over to her bed and picked up her tray, then brought it over to where Aerith was, and sat down next to her, picked up her own piece of bread, and deliberately took a large bite.

Aerith blinked slightly, then gave a faint smile. "I'm eating, I'm eating," she said, shaking her head, feeling a pinprick of happiness that Tifa was doing something. Tifa wasn't as active as she had been, and there were growing patches of time when Tifa would just...sit in a blank silence, feeling empty somehow, and Aerith would find herself desperately trying to draw Tifa back, to make her react, to make her seem _alive_ again... 

She'd needed Tifa to...to not be like that today. She hadn't realized it until just now, but by all the gods, she'd really, really needed that.

And right now, Tifa was glaring at her, until Aerith picked up a piece of fruit and put it in her mouth.

"See?" she said, then Tifa gave her a look but went back to her own food. They ate in silence, as they did everything now, and when the food was gone, Aerith took both the trays and stuck them back through the slots.

Tifa stayed on her bed, sitting there, in such a way that Aerith couldn't go crawl back into it like she wanted.

Aerith stared at her.

Tifa stared back.

Aerith's shoulders slumped, and she sat down next to Tifa with a sigh,

"I'm tired," she said.

Tifa didn't say anything.

"I don't know what to do," Aerith said.

Tifa didn't say anything.

"I'm scared," Aerith whispered.

Tifa didn't say anything. 

Aerith put her head on Tifa's shoulder, and Tifa didn't say anything. But she did rest her cheek on the top of Aerith's head, and they just stayed like that. In silence.

And Aerith felt, someone, just a little bit better. She didn't know what to do, and she didn't know how long this would last, but she did know at least she wasn't alone. She put her hand on Tifa's, and Tifa turned her hand over, and their fingers twined together, before Tifa went faintly slack in a way that made Aerith's heart thump hard in her chest.

She shut her eyes and held on tighter to Tifa's hand, and they stayed like this, silently sitting on the bed, until the Troopers and doctor came to take them away, into the mako tanks.

\--

Anneke walked into the cell, expecting anger or rage or...sullen silence, or _something_ , but there was just...two girls, sitting next to each other on a bed, one looking ready to break and clinging to the other to keep that from happening, and the other...

 _Samples. Not girls. They're_...

She hit them with Sleep so she didn't have to look at them looking like that anymore, at Aerith looking broken and Tifa looking...blank.

She made the Trooper pry their hands apart and she couldn't watch when he did.

Hojo was...he _had_ to be right.

He had to be.

She suspected she wouldn't be sleeping well again tonight.

\--

_"Do you see now, girl," her master says sharply. "Do you see with your own eyes what they can do?"_

_"No," she whispers, though she has no mouth, and falls to her knees at the sight. "No, this can't be right, how--" she says, shaking her head furiously in her confusion, unable to believe what her eyes are telling her._

_It is her home. Her home as it had been, before Sephiroth and the other SOLDIERs came. But...but it's not right; none of the people there are right. She can tell that even from here; her eyes have always been so sharp her father used to say she had dragon eyes, able to spot even a hillclimber goat on the side of the mountain from far away. The people there look so much like people who had died, but they aren't, even though they live in houses identical to what had had been there. It has been less than a year, but already, there is no sign of all the destruction of that terrible night. "No."_

_"This is what they do, girl," her master says again, but there is no anger in his voice anymore, only sadness. "Your home was never destroyed, no one was killed, and they made your memories a lie. You are the one no longer in step with the reality they have made. This is their power. Your home is a lie, girl, but they will make you a liar and kill you for it to make that true. Do you see now? So chose. Go back there and live a lie, or disappear and have no past. But the path you're trying to create now will only end with you hunted down and erased. If you want your revenge so badly, stay in the shadows. Wander and strike. And have no past. Because only this is the reality that exists now."_

_She looks at what had been her home, and the tears began. Her teacher came over, and wipes her eyes away with a hand, and guides her away._

\--

Anneke hated that she was right, that she hadn't slept that night. But at that sleepless night had been productive; she'd spent most of it continuing the research she'd started on the treatment and symptoms of mako poisoning, looking for _some_ cases in the literature about symptoms like XVIII was having.

She pushed away how hard it was to think of someone she had seen trying to give and draw strength to someone else as a _thing_.

She'd been doing reading all day, and she kept on doing reading once she got home, and...nothing. There was nothing. There were no cases that she had found that followed the trajectory Tifa seemed to be on.

Which would indicate something mental, but...but that didn't fit anything of what she knew of Tifa's personality.

There were pieces here, pieces she was missing, and that itched at the back of her brain as badly as trying to figure out how to even _think_ of the two girls in the cell.

She was going to figure this out. She was going to spend the next few days going over every scrap of information she could find in the labs, in her and the other scientists' notes, in the literature, until _something_ made all of this make sense.

Because...because what if Hojo _wasn't_ right?

And it was that question, more than anything else, that was starting to keep her awake at night.

\--

Things were...things were _not_ all right.

Aerith didn't know what had happened, but had a horrible fear that they were both reaching a tipping point - while Tifa had been the most tested upon, Aerith knew from the tendrils growing now within _her_ that she was in just as much danger as Tifa was. But Tifa...

Aerith had no idea if she was staring into her own future, seeing how now Tifa couldn't react to anything; was suddenly an empty _shell_. Aerith had no idea if it was too late or not, but she felt a growing horror as Tifa just...sat, empty and blank.

She wouldn't let that be her future. She wouldn't become _that_. And she wouldn't let Tifa stay like that.

"Find your promised land. Find your promised land," Aerith whispered to herself, clinging tightly to her mother's words to her.

She couldn't wait any more. _They_ couldn't wait anymore. They had to get out. And they had to do it _now_ , before it was too late for the both of them.

But she had no idea _how_.

Panic blossomed in her chest as Tifa stared blankly out into nothingness.

\--

When Anneke next went to see her test subjects, she was taken aback. XVIII was sitting quietly on her bed, but XVIII-A was breathing in frantic puffs and was wild-eyed.

This was a dangerous situation. Both girls had SOLDIER-level strength and speed, but none of the military discipline that also usually went with them. And it was as if the world were upended – XVIII-A had always been calm and, honestly, docile. She had shown occasional fits of temper, but they had all been in either defense of XVIII or when she had learned what had been done to them. But this was something else; this was XVIII-A in what seemed to be a full-blown panic attack, and that was something that was _dangerous_ when it involved SOLDIERs.

"Aerith. Aerith. Listen to me. Listen to my voice," Anneke said, going over to the girl and putting her hand on her forearm - not in a way that could be seen as threatening. 

And Tifa just stared out, unseeing and unresponsive.

"Look at her!" Aerith screamed, and Anneke couldn't think of them as numbers, no matter how hard she tried. "Look at what they - what you've - done to her!" she yelled, her voice going shrill and cracking.

Her hands were shaking. She was shaking.

"Please," Aerith said desperately. "If you have ever had even the _tiniest_ shred of humanity...please, let us go. This isn't right. What they're doing to us, to _her_ , it isn't right! And if this goes on any longer, there won't be any way to fix it!"

Laumbe swallowed thickly.

"They paid me to be a scientist. A doctor," she said, more to herself than Aerith, as if Aerith wasn't even there. "But this is something...this isn't what I signed up to be," she finished under her breath. She shut her eyes and took a deep breath, and visibly hardened before Aerith's eyes. "Do you know what you're asking me to do? You're asking me to throw away my entire life, my entire career, _everything_ I've worked this hard for," Laumbe said, frowning. "If I helped you...this isn't something that will just get me a reprimand and a bad mark or something. It means I never work as a scientist or a doctor anywhere on the _planet_ again. I'd be so blacklisted I'd be _lucky_ if I could even get a job so much as cleaning a lab or a clinic."

She shook her head, backing away. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry, but I can't," she said. "I can't just throw everything away like this," she said in a panic, and took off down the hall so quickly it was almost a run.

Aerith sank down to her knees and just tried to breathe.

\--

The security cameras almost scared her off. But she walked past it, as she often did - she had been in Hojo's office before, when he wasn't there - he'd asked her once to send him one of his floppies - _floppies_ \- via the ShinRa courier when he was at another ShinRa location.

She hesitated, then walked calmly over to where the floppies were, picked them all up, then sat down and popped the disk into the computer.

She had to _know_.

Once the computer finished reading the floppy - _who even uses floppies anymore?_ she thought - she clicked on one of the files, holding her breath and hoping she'd be able to guess the password.

She almost gasped when the file just _opened_. There was no password. None. Nor was it encrypted. She could scarcely believe it. Hojo was a genius, but this was incredibly... _stupid_. No encryption, no passwords, and on floppies he just left sitting around? Mind you, there were few computers that could actually read floppies; hers certainly couldn't, and you couldn't even buy computers now that could. In fact, often the only ones she knew of that _could_ were...the ones that Hojo used.

 _No wonder he doesn't bother password-protecting them_ , she thought, as a lightbulb went off and she found herself feeling a grudging respect for Hojo. _The very_ format _is protection nowadays_.

The first floppy held little of value, as did the second and third, but the fourth disk she popped in contained a folder entitled "Subject XVIII and XVIII-A," filed with files - spreadsheets and text files, including one labeled "Notes."

She took a deep breath, then stuck her memory stick into the computer and copied the entire folder.

As soon as it was done, she put the floppies back, powered off the computer, and left, keeping her head high and trying not to let her shakiness show.

\--

In the silence, she told Tifa stories. It was all Aerith could do. She filled the empty silence with stories. Stories about how she met Zack, stories about the quiet, still church where she would spend her time, stores about evading the Turks.

The stories about evading the Turks always tasted like ashes in her mouth, but she told them anyway.

And still Tifa sat, dull-eyed and hollow, unresponsive and blank.

She picked up a hairbrush and went over to Tifa. Tifa moved easily where Aerith moved her; pliant and malleable. She sat Tifa on the floor and sat on the bed behind her, with Tifa's shoulders between her knees. She picked up the hairbrush from where she had placed it on the bed, and began gently brushing Tifa's hair, since Tifa couldn't even do that for herself now.

"Did I ever tell you about when I was a little girl and decided to color all over the walls of my house?" Aerith said, her voice wavering at first, but steady by the time she finished the question. "Oh, my mother was so angry..."

\--

It wasn't until nearly two days later that Anneke finally gathered the nerve to actually look at the files. She had shoved the memory stick into her purse and left it there, and hadn't touched it since. But it had nagged at her; haunted her, and now, when the lab was quiet and she was the only one there, she finally took it out and plugged the memory stick into her laptop - _her's_ , not the computer at her desk. She hesitated clicking on the folder, then took a deep breath and opened it, and clicked on the first "Notes" file.

She _had to know_. She had tried to forget about it, get her head back, but she hadn't been able to. She couldn't let it go.

She had to know.

She hadn't gotten far before she started to feel uneasy. The unease only grow, turning quickly into queasiness the longer and more she read.

When she finished, she swallowed thickly as she leaned back into her chair.

It took her a minute to realize her hands were shaking.

"An _Ohnegesichterin_...he's trying to turn that girl into an _Ohnegesichterin_?!" she whispered. 

She _knew_ the stories--she was from Urtharbrun; _of course_ she knew the stories of the faceless women of the mountains, who tempted children and fools to trade their faces and left them empty blanks.

She also knew, of _course_ , that _Ohnegesichterin_ did not exist--they were surely just folktales to explain mako poisoning that could happen to people who fell into the mako pools out in the mountains--which in a way made whatever it was that Hojo was trying to do worse. He wasn't trying to genetically manipulate a monster into existence, he was trying to erase a girl's mind and replace it with something else. There was science and there was _madness_ , and as she read Hojo's notes, she realized what side of the line that Hojo was on.

 What side _she_ was on.  

She felt sick, but she knew that if she hesitated--if she even stopped to think at _all_ \--that she would rationalize this like she had rationalized everything she had done up until that point and everything she had been a part of; would let that other part of her, let the Dr. Laumbe so fascinated by what they could discover, take the place of _Anneke_.  

It was now or never.  

She deleted the files and was on her feet before she'd even finished the thought. 

 -- 

It was much later than it normally was when someone came to their room; late enough for Aerith to wonder for one panicked moment if she's lost track of time. But no - the lights had dimmed, meaning it was light, and she reckoned that they had another hour or so before the lights were turned completely off automatically, when it was fully "night." And yet, here was Dr. Laumbe at the door, alone.

 The doctor walked in with a wan smile, then set down the medical bag she was carrying, another oddity. She did sometimes come in with one, to check on them, but this late? "I was a little worried about Tifa there," Dr. Laumbe said. "I want to double check her, since her readings seem off."  Aerith nodded, and moved slightly to the side warily, not sure what exactly had gotten Dr. Laumbe's attention today - Tifa was no different from her normally worrying state, or nothing had changed since Laumbe'd rushed out before. But...but she'd said readings, and Aerith knew that ShinRa was monitoring them and routinely did test and collected blood from them. Had something happened? Aerith knew that Tifa felt _wrong_ , but nothing had--  

"You have fifteen minutes before the next patrol," Laumbe said quickly under her breath as she pretended to examine Tifa. "There's an elevator out the back that will let you out. You need a pass card to use it."  

Aerith was jolted suddenly out of her worried thoughts and for a moment, wondered if she had heard Dr. Laumbe wrong. Then it clicked, and her heart leapt with something she hadn't felt in a long time.

Hope. 

"Where can I--?" Aerith began, and Laumbe made a wry face.

  "I expect a good bump on the back of the head now, so I can plausibly say you hit me, then hit me with the Sleep I keep equipped. And took the pass off my coat," she said, her voice still at a whisper too low for the cameras to pick up, but good enough for what Aerith's hearing would catch, and she looked down at her badge meaningfully. "Go. _Now_. Before--before I change my mind," she said, and her voice shook.  

"Thank you," Aerith said, her knees almost going weak.  

She had been almost completely useless at the martial arts Tifa had tried to teach her, but some of it had sunk in. The blow she delivered to the back of Laumbe's head was neat, tidy and effective, and stronger than she had expected, so much so that it knocked the woman out cold. Aerith checked quickly to make she was all right, then swiped the card and the bracer, and hauled Tifa to her feet.  

"Let's go," she whispered against Tifa's cheek, and prayed to whatever gods might hear her prayer that they either escape or be killed quickly, because she wouldn't let this go on any more.  

Or the strength for her to kill them both if neither looked possible.  

Tifa's hand in hers, she took off at a run, and Tifa, unresponsive and blank, stumbled blindly where Aerith led.  

\-- 

Aerith didn't even realize until they got to the elevator just how high _up_ they were. She'd known the ShinRa building was tall, but that many numbers on the elevator almost boggled her mind.

It was practically a maze just navigating the elevators. A nerve-wracking series of changing elevators and false-starts, all of them almost seeming like they were designed to slow people down. And there were the troopers, patrolling the building in set intervals, that had to be avoided. It would have been easy, perhaps, to just cast Sleep on all of them, but what happened when they woke up? She had to get as much distance as she could between them and ShinRa before their disappearance was noticed. Every second felt like live wires against her skin, but she knew she had to take her time.

When Aerith finally managed to get them out of the building, the shock of cold hit her almost like a blow. She and Tifa had been living in a controlled environment for so long that she'd had no idea what season it was, let alone what the temperature would be, and while the only clothes they had were the light, spring clothes they had both been wearing when they were captured. By the feel, it was almost time for the Mid-Winter Festival. But she had no idea; the cold was like that of mid-winter under the Plate, and things were very different Above.

For one thing, it was _snowing_.

Aerith had only seen snow in pictures and on vids; a dreamlike thing that wasn't actually _real_ , no more real than any other imagined thing artists could create, or fantasies spun from a storyteller's mind.

She knew what snow was, or had had some theoretical thing that existed, like Bandersnatches and gods of summonings, but out was entirely something else to see them with your own eyes...or, in this case, feel it against your own skin.

Aerith couldn't help it; she let out a tiny gasp at the sight and feel of it, and looked around in wide-mouthed wonder at her first glimpse of snow.

She suddenly felt very small, as if the world contained so many more wonders than she could conceive of. And she felt _hope_ ; hope because if the world could contain something like this, a wonder that was for so many so mundane, then perhaps her Promised Land wasn't just her mother's fairy stories, but a thing that could work miracles.  "Flee Midgar, and find your promised land," Aerith whispered. "We'll get there, and it will fix us both. I'll make this right," Aerith said, now to Tifa. "I'll make this right for you. I promise."

She squeezed Tifa's hand, and took off for the shadows, shaking off her wonder. It would wait. It would have to. They would escape ShinRa, escape Midgar, and when she found her Promised Land and Tifa was better, she'd make Tifa take her to her homeland, to the wild mountains and wild flowers she had so often spoken of when she could still speak, and they would see the wonders that filled the world.

\--  

They were being stared at. Aerith could understand why; two greatly underdressed girls, one looking lost and one barely following in a stumble, rushing through the streets.

The cold should have felt _colder_ , Aerith knew. It had been a shock at first, but then had felt like nothing more than a cool Autumn evening. And then she remembered Zack, telling her about Modeoheim, and how much snow there had been...and how he hadn't even needed a coat, thanks to being a SOLDIER. 

But no one knew they were SOLDIERs. They just saw too underdressed girls in the snow, and it meant they _stood out_.

Aerith ducked them into an alleyway, and sat Tifa behind a few boxes. "Stay here," she said, and Tifa simply stared out, sitting where she had been sat. "I'm going to get us something to wear so we stop sticking out."

Tifa said nothing, but it felt right to be talking to her; telling her what was happening.

It didn't take Aerith long to pop a simple locks - she was a slum girl, and it wasn't like she'd found her church sitting there empty and _open_ all those years ago. It hadn't been a skill she used often, but It still only took her only a little while to pop the ones on a clothing store.

She suspected she could have just broken the lock with her bare hands, but she wasn't quire sure if she was mentally ready for that yet. She felt an almost hysterical laughter try to bubble up at the idea, and so she shied away from it. That was something for _later_ , when they were somewhere _safe_.

She grabbed two coats, both of which from the feel costs more than anything Aerith had ever touched in her _life_ , and both of which would be long enough to cover their clothes, and two hats. That would be enough for both of them, and would more than make them fit in with the people bustling around the city in winter gear. Then she froze, mouthed, "Sorry," and took several hundred gil she could from the cash register.

They would need it.

She picked up a purse and a wallet, pulled out the tissue paper filling the purse, and filled the wallet, and stuck it into the purse. She put on one of the coats and a hat, and carried the other out to Tifa.

"OK, Tifa, here you go. I know these aren't really your style, but I hope you like them anyway," she said, and held up an unbelievably soft woolen - cashmere, the label said - coat that was a pale pink and reached mid-calf on the her. "I know, pink doesn't seem to be your thing, but it looks so nice, with your black hair," she continued as she put it on her. The knit hat, like a beret, was just as soft, and she put it on Tifa's head with care, the same kind of care someone who could afford a coat like Tifa was wearing.

When she led Tifa out onto the main road, no one's eyes caught on them now. No one saw anything more than two pretty girls, out together on a crisp winter night. 

At least, that's what Aerith prayed they saw.

And they had wasted enough time; Aerith knew by now that Dr. Laumbe had to have woken up and have alerted ShinRa security that they had escaped. They had to get away, and get away _now_.

She walked them until she came to a city map, and her eyes alit on the train station. They could use the train to get some distance between them and ShinRa, and it would give her some time to figure out where exactly to go. It was risky, but it was less risky than staying Above Plate. 

She had to get Tifa to the church, but suspected that's where the Turks would look for them first. It was a risk she had to take, though - more than anything else, it was _her_ place, and it would help her quiet that terrifying voice in her head, telling her how to _destroy_. 

She needed to rehear how to _heal_.

 They got on the train and sat in the first car, nearest the conductor, since she figured anyone looking over at them would pay more attention to him driving than to them, and Aerith let herself relax. 

They hadn't been on the train more than fifteen minutes before there was an announcement. "Passengers, we are sorry for the inconvenience, but we've just been informed that we need to make an extended stop at the next station. Once we get to the Reactor Station, please remain in your seats. There will be a security check there, and no one will be allowed to depart until the train has been cleared."

Aerith felt her heart _sink_.

She wouldn't let them get caught her. She wouldn't. She had to get them off the train, even though it was risky, and even worse, because she _knew_ the Reactor station would be _crawling_ with--

 Aerith's eyes went wide, as she realized this was _exactly_ the station they wanted to be at. The reactor, after all, would get her where they wanted to go.  It was, after all, the way that Zack Fair had taken the first time they met.  

"Let's go," she said, squeezing Tifa's hand, and stood up and rapped on the glass to the conductor's area.  

"I'm sorry, but could you please let us out?"  

"No one is allowed--" he began, and Aerith gave him a pleading look.

  "My friend is sick," she said, and in a stroke of timing, Tifa started to list over slightly, and her head dropped onto her chest. "I'm trying to get her to a doctor, but she's getting worse, and..." she said, trailing off, and leaving the rest unsaid but understood--a security check of the entire train would take a very long time.  The conductor looked at Tifa, then bit his lip, and looked at the rest of the train. Everyone was looking at the other doors, except for one older woman giving him a disapproving look that softened when she looked over at Tifa and Aerith. He sighed, and opened his door, and gestured to them.

Aerith quickly hauled Tifa up, grateful that for all Tifa was blank, she wasn't a dead weight - she would go where lead, and that was enough to perhaps give them a chance, when they had little time and a woman carrying another would garner attention one woman leading another by the hand wouldn't.

"You can wait here, so they'll check you first," he said. "That will get you out fastest."

"Thank you," Aerith said. She knew it was as good as they got - if ShinRa wasn't looking for them yet, they could be out before the word did. And if they were...

Well. She was a slum girl, and now she was a SOLDIER. It would not go so well for the ShinRa goons as it had the last time they had come for her.  

\-- 

The conductor opened the door for the ShinRa troopers once the train had pulled into Midgar Reactor station and come to a stop. "I know you need to check everyone, but there are two girls and one of them is sick, who need to be checked first. If you could look at them so they could get to a doctor, that would really help them out," he said. He tilted his head towards them.

The Trooper shrugged. "As long as they aren't the girls we're looking for, they can leave. Send them out and I'll check their information while the rest of the boys check the train."

"Appreciated," he said, then stepped of the train so Aerith and Tifa would have a clear path out.

Aerith had been listening carefully to the conversation, despite seeming to be fussing over Tifa. Her heart was pounding in her chest - they didn't have ID, and they most likely were the two they were looking for.

Things were about to get messy, and she was glad that they would at least be outside, away from other passengers and hopefully the conductor who had tried to help them. 

But this was going to be a fight, and she was ready for it.

  Aerith carefully led Tifa off the train, making sure the purse she had stolen was hanging on her elbow, so she could easily slip in down to use as a weapon if need be.

As soon as she got them off the train and looked up, the trooper _swore_. 

"Shit! It's them!" he blurted out, clearly shocked.

Aerith took advantage of his shock to drop the purse to her hand, and fling it at his face. He was wearing a helmet, but still flinched back at something being thrown at him, and Aerith hit him with Sleep.

But they had been seen, and soon enough, there would be more troopers swarming out towards them..

They were going to have to _fight_.

She grabbed Tifa's hand, and was about to run when the conductor got in front of them. "I can't let you--" he began, and Aerith hit him with Sleep before he could finish the sentence.

And then, they ran from the station, into the belly of the beast.

\--

The first floor was almost easy.

The second, after word had spread, was far less so.

She fought her way up, through the increasing waves of ShinRa security trying to stop them. There were more Troopers, more guard machines, more monsters, more guards, more with each floor, as everyone swarmed in to catch them. She fought them and fought to protect Tifa, who could only stand, unseeing and unmoving, as the troopers aimed for her, trying to take out the "weak link" or keep Aerith distracted.

It seemed like it would never end. Like there would be on more ladder, one more floor, one more group to fight, and she was beginning to think it would never end. She was barely holding on, barely able to keep going, and only did because she _had_ to. She would fight until they were free or dead, because they were not going _back_.

One more ladder.

One more floor.

One more--

 _One_ \--

The cold was a moment of shock, like it had been when they first got out of the ShinRa building. They were _out_.

She'd had to carry Tifa up all the ladders, and now she put her down and dared to take a breath, feeling almost giddy. The snow on her face was a miracle, sign they had made it. She grabbed Tifa's wrist and led her to the edge of the top of the reactor building. They had reached the roof, finally, _finally_ , and all they had to do was--

 And that instant, she felt the bullets from turrets slamming into her back; more of them than she could count.  

She fell forward, pushing Tifa to safety off the edge even though she still held her hand. Tifa dangled from the edge, her wrist tight in Aerith's grasp all that kept her from falling into whatever lay far, far below.   She...she couldn't feel _anything_. Not anything below the small of her back, where at least one of the bullets had hit. Above it, there was pain, so much pain she could barely even register it. She hadn't been expecting it, hadn't known the turrets were there, and hadn't had a Barrier or anything up to protect her - she had exhausted herself fighting up, and it took more energy than she had to maintain it when she didn't need to. And now, it felt like circles of burning pain lancing through her, and the blood. She could feel the blood, flowing both into her and pouring out of her. She could feel it flowing into her belly. She could feel the labored sound of her own breathing, of a lung that is no longer filling, and how each rasping breath was causing air to fill the cavities of her own body.  

 _I'm dying. Oh, by all the gods, I'm really dying_. She knew, then, that even with the full power of the limit break she could feel beating wildly within her, that it _wouldn't_ be enough - it was too late, there wasn't enough time; a threshold had been crossed, and she was too far gone.  

She was too far gone, but...but Tifa _wasn't_. She could feel Tifa's wrist in her hands, and the little voice that had always told her how to heal told her, that Tifa had been hit, was hurt, but she could survive it; the light of life was still flickering strong inside her.  

And...wait. Tifa's eyes were open, but now something was different, there was something almost there--  

She could hear them coming, the sounds on the ladder clattering as troopers climbed up. Aerith used the last of her strength and spoke, the words desperate.  

"Please," Aerith whispered, struggling with her words as her lung, the only one working, spasmed. She managed to reach out with her free hand, the one not holding on to Tifa, and touch Tifa's face in the little time they had left. Something flickered again for the briefest moments behind eyes that had been so blank, and Aerith felt the tiniest spark of hope, hope that it wasn't too late for Tifa, even if she knew it was for her. She felt the limit break finally hit and gave into it, focusing all of it on Tifa, healing all of the other woman's wounds completely and exhausting the last of her own strength. "Live. And remember. Live for me. _Remember_ for me."

  --

_Take this face, then, Aerith says, and the girl who has lost her face thinks her very beautiful, shining like a goddess in the darkness.  Take my face, since you have none, Aerith says, and the girl who has lost her face wants it--she wants her face, wants a face again, wants to be, wants to remember--_

  _The girl who has lost her face reaches out, reaches towards Aerith's, and Aerith closes her eyes._ _Then her eyes, nose, lips, her face, are wiped away. The girl who has lost her face stares at the emptiness that had once been a person with a name for a moment, then raises her hands to her own face that is not, and as she draws her fingers across it, she draws features, feels them rising under the tips of her fingers, feels a name and memories and who she is come to her again as she slips on the other girl's face that is now her own; feels herself become_ again.

  --

  "Down, they're down! Get them, hurry up! Don't let them escape!!"  

Distantly, Aerith could hear their voices and knew they had no more little time left.

  She looked at Tifa again, for one last time. Their eyes met, Tifa's eyes suddenly sharp and _aware_ , for an instant, and Aerith gave her a beautiful, wavering smile verging on tears. Tifa mirrored that wavering smile, and the tears in Aerith's eyes overflowed. "Find your Promised Land...and see the sky for me," she whispered through the blood in her mouth, the words more breath than sound, the last of what little breath she could manage, and she let go of Tifa's hand.  

She didn't even feel it when Tifa's hand slipped from hers, or the tears on her checks, or when the troopers, a hair too slow to stop her from letting go of Tifa, grabbed her. 

"Dammit, a Cure, does anyone have a--!"

 The blinding pain was gone now, and there was only the warmth of her mother's - her real mother's - smile, from all those years ago, welcoming her.

  And then, there was only the fragrance of lilies and the warm, white light of the Lifestream that burned away that evil thing that ShinRa had put inside of her, and set her free. 

 --

 _And as she goes into free fall, as she falls through the air to the church below, she turns her face to the sky...and_ remembers.    

 --  

_What's at the core of my existence isn't nothingness. It's not that desolate, arid place. What is inside of me is love.  
-Haruki Murakami, 1Q84 Book 2_


End file.
